OUR MISSION AND VALUES
THE BFF MISSION
Birthing Families Foundation is a reproductive justice based charitable organization delivering skilled doula services to vulnerable families, providing continuing education to perinatal professionals and working on large scale systems challenges that impact all birthing families.
OUR VALUES
OUR VALUES
Community
Community is an experience and a feeling, it is our relationships as well as a place. At BFF we want our community and relationships to feel like:
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We recognize the land as the holder and connector of community and we support land back initiatives and land protection movements led by Indigenous communities.
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We aim for clear and non violent communication that is accountable, and that our words matter. At BFF, we seek inclusive word containers and are committed to being brave with our words and to practice and celebrate active listening as a continued practice of undoing supremacy.
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Each person, business, service, provider, place, group, and modality of health has a place in the community and we would like to encourage our community to see themselves as a ring of support.
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We recognize our place as connectors and facilitators rather than experts or leaders and we trust people as the authority on their own experience.
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We seek to connect families with supports and services that feel appropriate and culturally competent to their traditions, beliefs and practices and push back against cultural appropriation in birth work.
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We explicitly name humility as a community care action intentionally.
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We recognize that skill sharing outside of a capitalist model was the root of community for all of our ancestors for most of time, and is essential as an aspect of a healthy community. At BFF, we regularly share skills and best practices.
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We facilitate integrative models of support and recognize that support must also include resourcing people to thrive during all parts of the family journey surrounding fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum and beyond.
Support
Working in an equitable support model, requires looking at the individual needs of each person and family. The scope of this at BFF is encompassed by:
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We know it is essential that all employees, doulas and community members that engage with families through BFF understand the significance of and potential treatment of patients/families based on their intersections of identity.
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We recognize that many people are survivors of sexual violence and/or trauma and that support must be trauma informed and that families, doulas and caregivers must have tools, resources and places to recover from and/or integrate trauma.
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We recognize there are present day inequities from perinatal morbidity, to infant death, to perinatal mood disorders affecting our BIPOC communities and that anyone working near or with pregnant or birthing bodies must understand that the field of Obstetrics and Gynecology was founded on the erasure of peoples and based in colonialism.
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We acknowledge ancestral trauma is a reason that some families mistrust or fear various systems in our society that are regularly engaged with while birthing and parenting. We acknowledge that patterns of addiction or abuse can and do perpetuate within lineages of all people. We trust people to advocate for themselves and we reframe any implications of neglect or abuse as gaps of support caused by the violent legacies of systemic misogyny and racism.
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We look for opportunities to support movements and be in conversation with those in community who are interested in releasing old harmful paradigms and building new ways that feel supportive to everyone. We believe that support, advocacy, education and medicine are linked.
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It is our intention to approach birthing people as their own way finders and meet them where they are, without agenda or attachment to the delivery of care.
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Our support models remember and reflect that pregnancy, birth and parenting should foundationally center around connection, joy, love and safety.
Equity
Our organization upholds equitable practices and recognizes that all people see and receive support and care differently depending on who they are and how they are situated in society.
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Canada’s history of colonial violence and present supremacy structures are named explicitly in all our learning spaces and considered in the creation of care models, resource documents and provider referrals.
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Acknowledging care work is deeply undervalued and addressing pay gaps and compensating doulas and associated individuals for their labor.
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Holding a container that can explore both gender equity AND trans and non binary inclusion.
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Insisting that birthing families and parents must be educated on informed consent practices, and informed refusal.
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Living the inquiry of what can be accomplished towards collective liberation within the non profit industrial complex.
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Recognizing that charities are an expression of saviorism and that we must continue to acknowledge we were founded on and continually supported by white privilege, and are committed to doing the labor of challenging white supremacist structures while operating within them.