NURTURE
Why NURTURE?
This was not the case in any African and other traditional societies. All traditional cultures understood the vulnerability of new moms and the need to care for them collectively. We want to recover and popularize these traditional wisdoms by rebuilding a collective postpartum support community through the NOURISH!-Village.
What is NURTURE?
These postpartum care kits are curated by Black moms for Black moms. Each kit is full of health supplies that new moms will need during that crucial first postpartum week. This is a week that is seldom talked about and few new moms are prepared for: healing from the birthing process and adjusting to the challenges of having a newborn. And, all this is often done in isolation as new moms in modern society do not have a village to support them.
To date we have given 75 bags to our new mamas! The first fifty bags were funded through MPJ, for the next 50 bags, we were funded through the Community Wishlist Program of Natural Resources in San Francisco. They matched us to one of their Wishlist funders. Many thanks to Natural Resources and the Elman Legacy Foundation for helping us to gift 50 more bags to our mamas.Presently, we are giving bags to the mamas in BeLoved Birth Black Centering at Alameda Health System’s Eastmont Wellness Center.
We are currently fundraising to provide the bags to all the mamas that receive NOURISH...the Black Centering at SF General and ROOTS Community Center in Oakland. Join others in helping to continue gifting these mamas’Postpartum bags, please donate to MPJ and highlight the NURTURE program. Each bag is valued at $300.
How it Started
he NURTURE Project came out of talking with our Peer Coordinator, Tia , she mentioned that after she had her baby, she realized that mamas needed items ahead of time for when they came home Postpartum. She had independently given “Postpartum Care Packages” to her new mama friends. We thought that was a wonderful idea....to give the new mamas that we support with NOURISH, a bag of products that we thought they would need in those important two weeks Postpartum, so they could stay home and heal and not have to take baby out to a store to get things they didn’t know they needed beforehand...to be NURTUREd!
