Elephant Circle

Inspired by how elephants give birth in the wild, Elephant Circle believes every person, family, and organization deserves a circle of support.

Elephant Circle provides birth justice capacity-building strategies centered on tackling systems of power and oppression and offers expertise in health systems and legal systems as they relate to the perinatal period.

State allies can call on Elephant Circle to:

Provide personalized and experience-based learning opportunities—combined with actionable and grounded tools—on movement building.

Elephant Circle can provide training on using coalition, networks, campaigns, and interdisciplinary work to advance the work of birth justice locally and and at the state level.

Provide strategy and guidance on policy and advocacy rooted in community power.

Elephant Circle can help advocates better understand the use of design justice, organizing, and community-based lenses in policy advocacy work.

Help advocates pursue and support the expansion of community-based perinatal services.

Elephant Circle can work with advocates on building and sustaining community-owned and operated birth centers.

Elephant Circle has also provided broader overviews on involving community in policy advocacy for the wider Alliance network and can work with state advocates to provide similar presentations in their states and communities.

On the Ground:

In Michigan, Elephant Circle has helped grassroots leaders from Birth Detroit and Mothering Justice launch the Michigan State of Birth Justice Coalition , and helped them take community input and turn it into the Michigan Momnibus—a slate of bills to advance birth justice. Elephant Circle also helped develop the Michigan State of Birth Justice Toolkit to advance those bills. The bills have sponsors and are expected to be introduced soon.
In Tennessee , Elephant Circle co-hosted the second People’s Tribunal to End Obstetric Violence and Obstetric Racism with community-based Tennessee organizations like CHOICES Memphis, Birthing Cultural Rigor, and Healthy and Free Tennessee. The event brought together storytellers, advocates, and policymakers to uplift and seek redress for people who had experience disrespect, mistreatment, and racism during the perinatal period, and then supported them in filing complaints with the Federal Office for Civil Rights.
In California , Elephant Circle provided a series of workshops for the Midwifery Learning Collaborative convened by the Institute for Medicaid Innovation. These workshops invited a diverse group of stakeholders to develop approaches for integrating community input and participation into their goals and operational action plans. Participants took away both tangible tools and a transformative experience that will support them in maintaining the mindsets of innovation and community-based design.

“Elephant Circle has provided us with strategic advice and consultation every step of the way. We are about to have a set of bills introduced and we couldn’t have done it without their help.”

Nicole White, Michigan State of Birth Justice

“Being new to a lot of this, I have been exposed to a lot of things I never thought about before. You can actually attack a lot of different oppressions and inequities under birth equity. That’s something I would love people to understand.”