About BCE
Birth Center Equity was created to make birth center care an option in every community, by growing and sustaining birth centers led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).
We envision a world where every community has access to a birth center.
Birth Center Equity works with and for BIPOC community birth center leaders to collectively access full spectrum capital at scale, to nurture beliefs, practices, and models of abundance among community birth centers, and to build beloved communities with caregiving, regeneration, and mutuality at the heart of our health system and our economy.
BCE seeks to continuously practice and honor our three core values:
BCE Values
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All Black, Indigenous, people of color deserve safe birth spaces and safe birth care, as well as safe spaces that support our growth, leadership, and relationships. Ensuring our safety includes healing and reparation of harm and inequity in maternal health practices, structures and systems (including inequitable access to capital) that have oppressed our communities. Ensuring our safety also includes healing and reparation within our networks and organizations and treating one another with respect, grace, and kindness.
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With trusted relationships and solidarity come abundant resources to grow and sustain Black, Indigenous, and People of Color community-owned and led birth infrastructure, and realize beloved economy. Beloved economy rejects scarcity, supremacy and resource hoarding; and instead centers care, liberatory relationships, abundance, community wealth and power building.
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Safe, loving, and liberatory birth for all birthing people is essential to racial, gender, and reproductive justice. BCE honors the human right to bodily autonomy, to have and to not have children, to parent in a safe, healthy, nonviolent environment, and the rights to self-definition and sexual freedom. (See Sister Song Reproductive Justice declaration.) We believe that leading together in our own care is an act of liberation, and that honoring birth as a chosen sacred transformative experience at every level (individual, organization, community, culture) will transform birth culture for all.
Our Story
Our Growth. Today, grounded in the leadership of CEO & Co-Founder Leseliey Welch, BCE continues to grow organizational capacity, leadership, and structures necessary to achieve our mission and realize our vision. With the help of generous donors and foundation partners, BCE has grown from an organization of two part-time volunteer founders in 2020, to two full-time staff in 2024, to a team of thirteen full-time employees in 2025.
Birth Center Equity was born in April, 2020, during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At that time, Leseliey Welch, who was co-founding Birth Detroit, and Nashira Baril, who was leading the creation of Neighborhood Birth Center, began receiving message after message from people asking them, “Is your birth center open?” Their heartbreaking answer to each caller was, “No, not yet.”
These callers, often people far along in their pregnancies, were seeking a safe place to give birth, somewhere that was not a hospital overwhelmed with COVID-19. What they sought was the safety of a community birth center, a homelike facility where prenatal, labor, birth, and postpartum care is provided in the midwifery and wellness model, and birthing people are supported to make informed decisions about how and where they birth.
The urgency and opportunity of the pandemic led Leseliey and Nashira to create Birth Center Equity as a channel for resources to increase access to community birth center care during COVID-19, and to create vibrant lasting community birth center infrastructure across the country.
