As part of our celebration of this year’s Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17), the Alliance is spotlighting a few of the maternal health organizations it has met as part of the Power Equity Fund, a new early childhood policy advocacy fund that is distributing the Alliance’s $10-million McKenzie Scott grant. Often not widely known or resourced, these organizations are making an impact by centering the agency of the communities they serve.
Founded in 2017 by Ashlei Spivey, Nebraska’s I Be Black Girl serves as a collective for Black
women and girls to actualize their full potential to authentically be through autonomy, abundance and liberation. Based in the heart of Omaha, I Be Black Girl focuses on policy and power building, Black-led investments, birth justice, and economic justice.
The organization has continued to grow over its eight-year history, and today convenes its neighbors for a long list of community and power-building work. There’s organizing and advocacy for crucial maternal health policies, such as expanding 12-month post partum Medicaid coverage. There’s a business incubator that just graduated a cohort of child care providers. There’s extensive work to strengthen and expand the doula workforce, including through a comprehensive custom training program.
In 2023, I Be Black Girl launched its bi-annual Reproductive Justice Summit, which is attended by hundreds of advocates from across the state and the U.S.
In 2023, the organization was awarded a three-year investment from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) Building Local Alignment Initiative to develop participatory grantmaking frameworks that redistribute resources to the reproductive wellbeing of Black women, femmes, and girls and the community organizations that are leading this crucial work.
And in 2024, Spivey was selected as one of 10 national winners of the 2024 JM Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize, an innovation award elevating the most promising early-stage projects in environment, heritage conservation, and social justice.
But Spivey is quick to tell you this work is not about awards and prestige. Their clear focus is community voice, power, and autonomy. “If we do not center the people most impacted and who have the lived experience,” she says, “we will perpetuate the same harm we seek to end. We want to radically reimagine how we center the voices of community in policy and advocacy agendas, to chart a new course, experience, and outcome.”
To that end, I Be Black Girl raised $1 million for its own building in 2024, the Anarcha Center, named after Anarcha Westcott. It will provide a dedicated, permanent home for many of its programs and serve as a community hub.
Spivey is also excited about the Power Equity Fund’s work to champion trust-based, unrestricted investment in nonprofits.
“Having unrestricted general operating funding demonstrates a trust in our leadership to put the dollars where we need to advance the mission and work that funder says they align with,” she says. “It makes all the difference especially in unstable times.”
The theme of this year’s Black Maternal Health Week is “Healing Legacies: Strengthening Black Maternal Health Through Collective Action and Advocacy.” It’s hard to imagine a better representation of that charge than Nebraska’s I Be Black Girl.
