The Application Deadline for The Bigger Table Fund is July 15th!

The Application Deadline for Bigger Table Fund is July 15th!

If you are a midwifery student or midwife of color, an indigenous and/or LGBTQ student or midwife, and you are ready to take or retake your NARM exam, or to apply for state licensure, we encourage you to appy to the Bigger Table Fund! Our current round of applications closes July 15th.

Apply now for the current Award Cycle

The goal of the fund is to remove some of the significant financial barriers that midwifery students and midwives of color, indigenous and/or LGBTQIA+ students and midwives face when entering the CPM profession. We recognize that there are multiple barriers beyond the NARM examination and state licensure fees, and it is our ardent intention to grow this fund in the coming years to help defray some of those additional expenses.

2022 Application Deadlines

July 15, October 15

Funds are distributed quarterly, according to a lottery system, with $3000 available per cycle. The maximum individual award is $1000.

Read more about the Bigger Table Fund here.

NACPM stands in staunch opposition to the anti-abortion laws being enacted across the country

NACPM stands in staunch opposition to the anti-abortion laws being enacted across the country, culminating with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. As midwives, we hold bodily autonomy, self-determinaton and dignity as central tenets to the application of human rights and the fulfillment of our model of care. We stand firm in our commitment to reproductive justice: to have children, to not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Today, we unapologetically and urgently recommit to centering full spectrum sexual and reproductive health care in our work, including ensuring people’s access to safe, respectfulabortion care in the United States.

NACPM Treasurer Mimi Niles Ph.D, MPH, CNM/LM to Join panel on the Webinar Launch of Birth Place Lab’s Giving Voice to Mothers Study Report

On Tuesday June 28th at 11am PDT, NACPM Treasurer Mimi Niles will be one of five webinar panelists as Birth Place Lab launches their Giving Voice to Mothers Study Report, a study on quality of care as experienced by pregnant persons from communities of color (Black, Indigenous, and Latinx) and those who planned to give birth in homes and birth centers.

What do quality and safety mean to service users?

In the Giving Voice to Mothers Study, community members worked with clinicians, NGO leaders, and researchers to design a study on quality of care as experienced by pregnant persons from communities of color (Black, Indigenous, and Latinx) and those who planned to give birth in homes and birth centers. Together they developed and administered a cross-sectional online survey to explore novel topics including: agency in decision-making, coercion and non-consented procedures, access to supportive services, and systemic respect or discrimination over the course of care.

The webinar will explore the key findings from the report, and discuss how they can transform the lived experience of perinatal services and assure equitable access to the highest quality of care for all service users.

Moderator - Nzinga Blake - Executive Producer, Race & Culture - ABC Owned Television Stations

Nzinga Blake is an Emmy Award-winning Executive Producer with a specialty in capturing multicultural & underrepresented voices. She has had the pleasure of being on both sides of the camera as the first African American “human” to host a show on Cartoon Network, in addition to appearing as talent on ABC, Showtime, Current TV, Network 10 Australia TV Guide, and BET. She has also produced for production companies, organizations, and social impact companies, including For Good Entertainment, Causecast, Emergency USA, the United Nations International Labour Organization, Tribune Media and is currently a Race & Culture Executive Producer for ABC Owned Television Stations. The work she has co-executive produced at the owned stations has been featured in various news outlets that include Variety, Deadline, Forbes Magazine, TV News Check, Cronkite News Lab, etc. On a personal note, she spent most of her childhood in Japan, Kenya, and the US. Nzinga is a proud Bruin and is a Cum Laude graduate of the University of California Los Angeles School of Film, Television, and Digital Media.

Presenter - Saraswathi Vedam, PhD, RM, FACNM, Sci D(hc) Principal, Birth Place Lab

Saraswathi Vedam is Lead Investigator of the Birth Place Lab and Professor of Midwifery in the Faculty of Medicine at University of British Columbia. Over the past 35 years, she has served as clinician, educator, researcher, and mother of four daughters. Dr. Vedam has coordinated several transdisciplinary and community-led research projects across North America, including the Access and Integration Maternity care Mapping (AIMM) Study on the impact of integration of midwives on maternal-newborn outcomes, and the Giving Voice to Mothers Study that established significant differences by race, type of provider, and place of birth in experience of mistreatment by maternity providers. She is currently PI for RESPCCT, a national study to examine respectful maternity care across Canada, with a focus on amplifying voices of communities that are seldom heard.

Dr. Vedam and her team developed and validated three new person-centred measures, the Mothers’s Autonomy in Decision Making (MADM) scale, the Mothers on Respect (MOR) index, and the Mistreatment by Providers (MIST) index. In 2017 MADM and MORi received the 2017 National Quality Forum Innovation Prize, and they are now are being applied in 23 countries to evaluate quality of maternity care at the institutional, system, and country levels.

Professor Vedam has provided expert consultations to policy makers, public health agencies, and legislators in Mexico, Hungary, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Canada, the US, and India. She was Convener and Chair of 4 national Birth Summits in the United States. At these historic summits a multi-stakeholder group of leaders crafted a common agenda to address equitable access to high quality perinatal services for all communities across birth settings. In 2017, she was named Michael Smith Health Research Institute Health Professional Investigator.

Panelists

Tatyana Ali Mother, Actress & Advocate

With a career spanning 35 years, Tatyana Ali is best known to millions, worldwide, for playing “Ashley Banks” in the iconic comedy series “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”. Born in Brooklyn, NY, she is a Broadway-trained actress, singer, producer, activist and Harvard University graduate.

Ali has appeared in numerous television, film and theatrical projects over her career, which began at four years old including Sesame Street, the Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway production of Fences, The Young and the Restless and Disney’s Glory Road. The 5-time NAACP Image Award winner, Harvard Aspiring Minority Business Leader and Black Girls Rock! honoree, was named one of most beautiful women in the world by People Magazine en Español and People Magazine.

She holds a gold record for her 1998 debut album Kiss the Sky, which included the hit singles “Daydreamin” and “Boy You Knock Me Out” and joined both the *NSYNC and The Backstreet Boys world tours. In 1999, her recording of “Precious Wings” for The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland soundtrack won a Grammy Award for “Best Musical Album for Children”. In 2013 Ali released the independent EP “Hello”.

She has produced numerous projects for television networks including several holiday films for Lifetime TV and “Love That Girl!”, the first original scripted program on the TV One Network.

Ali has spent most of her life engaging in humanitarian efforts. During the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, she served as a surrogate for President Obama, speaking to communities and young people across the country about voting as an imperative. She did the same grass roots work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. She has hosted the United Negro College Fund’s “Empower Me” Tour 3 years in a row, has been a spokesperson for the Millennium Momentum Foundation for 8 years and is actively involved in Black Girl’s Rock!, an organization dedicated to educating and mentoring young women. After publishing her first op-ed in Essence magazine entitled “Birthright” where she shared her own harrowing journey, Tatyana was asked to serve as a Celebrity Council Advocate for the March of Dimes. She works to advance Black maternal health. She currently serves as a board member of Hedgebrook, an organization dedicated to supporting women identifying writers. She resides in California with her husband and two sons.

Jennie Joseph, LM, CPM Founder and President of Commonsense Childbirth, Inc.

Jennie Joseph is a British-trained midwife who fights to ensure every person has their healthiest possible pregnancy, birth and postpartum experience with dignity and support. Jennie created The JJ Way®, which is an evidence-based, maternity care model delivering readily-accessible, patient-centered, culturally-congruent care to women in areas that she terms “materno-toxic zones”. Her focus and drive is to ensure that Black women and other marginalized people remain safe and empowered inside broken and inequitable maternity health systems that have become dangerous and all too often, lethal.

She is the Executive Director of her own non-profit corporation Commonsense Childbirth Inc. which operates a training institute, health clinics and a birthing center in Orlando, Florida, and is also the founder of the National Perinatal Task Force, a grassroots organization whose mission is the elimination of racial disparities in maternal child health in the USA. In July 2020 her school, Commonsense Childbirth School of Midwifery became the first and only privately-owned, nationally accredited midwifery school owned by a Black woman in the United States. Jennie is the founder and a proud member of The Council of Midwifery Elders, she serves on the Advisory Council for the Congressional Black Maternal Health Caucus, is a Fellow of The Aspen Institute, and has been recognized as a TIME Woman of The Year 2022 for her work in promoting perinatal equity.

Nicholas Rubashkin, MD, PhD UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, Division of Hospitalist Medicine  |  Human Rights in Childbirth

Nicholas Rubashkin, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF where he works as an obstetric hospitalist. He holds a PhD in Global Health Sciences, also from UCSF. In his clinical practice, research, and advocacy, he focuses on the provision of evidence-based and respectful maternity care. He seeks to address the social, cultural, and economic drivers of poor quality maternity care and mistreatment of women in birth facilities. He has published on such topics as informal cash payments in maternity care, uterine fundal pressure, and obstetric violence. His dissertation research concerned the ways in which a vaginal birth after cesarean prediction tool, called a “VBAC calculator” reproduced racism in American maternity care. Since 2015 he has served on the board of the international non-profit Human Rights in Childbirth (HRiC).

Chandra A. Adams, MD, MBA - Board-Certified Obstetrician/Gynecologist and Women's Health Economist  |  Physician Owner, Full Circle Women's Care of Jacksonville, FL  |  Medical Director, Transitions Birth Center of Jacksonville, FL

A direct descendant of two of the last granny midwives in southern Alabama, Dr. Adams believes in integrating the midwifery model of care with modern obstetrics. She works closely with midwives who perform in and out of hospital births, and has created a system at her private practice, Full Circle Women’s Care of Jacksonville, that boasts a labor-to-Cesarean conversion rate between nine and eleven percent per year. As a VBAC (vaginal-birth after Cesarean) mom of three young children at home, Dr. Adams is a strong proponent for evidence-based medicine and women’s safe choices in labor, with her practice averaging an annual VBAC-success rate around 85%. As a bonus mom to a college grad on a pre-med track, she understands the importance of inspiring the next generation to reach their full potential. To that end, serves as an Obstetric Preceptor for Family Medicine Residents in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

Dr. Adams is a fierce community advocate, known for challenging the status quo on sensitive topics such as maternal mortality, surrogacy, trauma-informed care, the impact of maternity on healthcare economics, and mental health evaluation in all phases of care. She was named Women’s Advocate of the Year by the JAX Chamber Professional Women’s Council. She is a sought-after speaker, and has addressed the American College of Nurse Midwives at multiple state conventions. Dr. Adams often appears on WJXT in Jacksonville, FL as an expert on women's health. Expecting mothers travel hundreds of miles to be under the concierge care of her team for what Full Circle has coined, “The 180-degree Birth Experience.”

Dr. Chan Adams is a board-certified physician specializing in Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is an alumna of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and completed her post-graduate training at Hahnemann University Hospital via Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a Lean Six Sigma green belt, with an Executive Healthcare Masters of Business Administration from the University of Miami. Dr. Adams is board-certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

P. Mimi Niles, Ph.D, MPH, CNM/LM - Assistant Professor, New York University

Mimi Niles, PhD, MPH, CNM/LM is an Assistant Professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. She is a theorist, educator, researcher and certified nurse-midwife. Her work explores the potential of integrated models of midwifery care in creating health equity in historically disenfranchised communities. She is trained in utilizing critical feminist theory, as theorized by Black and brown feminist scholars, and qualitative research methods as a means to implement policy and programming rooted in pro-social and anti-oppression frameworks. As a researcher, she hopes to generate midwifery knowledge as a tool to build equity and liberation for marginalized and minoritized people and grow the profession of midwifery globally.

Call for NACPM Board Nominations!

The National Association of Certified Professional Midwives (NACPM) is calling for nominations of CPMs to be considered to run for election to its Board of Directors.  Currently, the NACPM Board has five elected and four appointed Directors. Three Board positions are open for election in 2022.  NACPM by-laws are available here.  

You may nominate yourself or someone else. If you are nominating another CPM, please confirm the person's interest and capacity to meet the expectations of Board Directors listed below prior to submitting their name. You may nominate more than one person by submitting the online form more than once.  All nominations must be received by 7/15/2022.

NACPM is a mission-driven, values-based membership organization representing Certified Professional Midwives in the United States.  Founded in 2001, NACPM has adopted a public policy agenda for promoting access to midwives and the integration of CPMs into the perinatal care system in the U.S.; addressing barriers to practice; supporting equitable reimbursement and licensing of CPMs in all U.S. jurisdictions; promoting equity and social justice in midwifery and perinatal care; supporting quality care through clinical practice resources; and engaging in state and federal advocacy to improve the health of all childbearing people. 

NACPM is in an exciting time of transition and expansion. We are reimagining our future, assessing what has worked for us and learning about ways that we can be more supportive to the CPM community. We are building a board that will identify the next  steps in our strategic approach and our new Executive leadership. Serving on the NACPM board is exciting and rewarding work, providing opportunities to contribute to the profession and to develop leadership skills

 To qualify for consideration, the nominee must:

• Be a CPM and a current member of NACPM

• Attest to alignment with NACPM’s Commitments

• Commit to meeting the expectations (below) of NACPM Board members

• Have life and/or work experience/study/training/personal development in dismantling racism and colonialism prior to running for election to the NACPM Board.  NACPM has an ardent commitment to centering birth equity and reproductive justice in all our work.  We ask that nominees for the Board be on this journey prior to joining our leadership team. 

Expectations of Board members include: 

• Join two all day NACPM Leadership Team meetings each year, fall and spring, including the fall meeting this year on October 15, 16 & 17, plus travel days/time.  All meeting expenses are paid by NACPM

• Contribute approximately 2 - 6 hours each week to the work of the Board

• Support fundraising and membership growth to ensure the viability and sustainability of NACPM

• Participate in NACPM’s ongoing equity work to become a more racially and socially just organization, including structured conversations and trainings for our team.

Please consider running for the NACPM Board of Directors! 

Submit Your Nomination Below

Applications Now Open for NACPM’s New Tanya Khemet Taiwo Midwifery Student Scholarship Fund!

Applications due by July 15, 2022! - Six $5,000 scholarships will be awarded in September 2022!

NACPM is excited to announce a new initiative to grow the number of Black and Indigenous midwives in the CPM workforce: the Tanya Khemet Taiwo Midwifery Student Scholarship Fund. This scholarship fund is made possible by a generous grant to NACPM from Direct Relief International.

The Tanya Khemet Taiwo Midwifery Student Scholarship Fund will provide support for tuition and related educational expenses to second- and third-year Black and Indigenous midwifery students enrolled in programs accredited by the Midwifery Education Accreditation Council (MEAC).

This Fund is a celebration of the legacy of Dr. Tanya Khemet Taiwo, NACPM’s longest-serving Black Woman on NACPM’s Board of Directors, as well as an exemplary community health innovator, epidemiologist, researcher, and midwifery educator. Tanya served the maximum allowable three three-year terms on the Board of NACPM from 2012-2021, including as Secretary, Co-President, and President. NACPM has launched this fund in Tanya’s name as an acknowledgement of her legacy of outstanding service and her commitment to eradicating inequities in birth outcomes for Black and Indigenous birthing people and their babies in the U.S.

To hear directly from Tanya about her story and journey with NACPM, listen to this podcast from Shirley McAlpine’s She’s Got Drive with Dr. Tanya Khemet Taiwo and NACPM Vice President Dr. Keisha Goode.

This Fund expands on NACPM’s history of success in supporting midwifery students from communities most in need of midwifery care through our Bigger Table Fund, which as of Spring 2022 has provided over $43,000 to more than 50 midwives since 2018.