Nashira (she/her), is the daughter and great-granddaughter of midwives. She experienced firsthand the sacred care of community midwives at the home births of her siblings in 1987 and 1989 and her own two children in 2013 and 2017. These births transformed her worldview and put her on a path to receive a big assignment from elder midwives who first held the vision for a birth center in Roxbury in the 1980s.

With a master’s degree in Maternal and Child Health from Boston University School of Public Health and 20 years of experience designing and implementing public health strategies to advance racial equity, Nashira founded Neighborhood Birth Center in 2015 and co-founded Birth Center Equity in 2020. Neighborhood Birth Center will be the first-of-its-kind community birth center in Boston, providing full scope community midwifery to strategically address the maternal health crisis. Nashira brings a structural analysis and embodied practice to the design and implementation of public health strategies that advance justice and equity. She has worked at the Boston Public Health Commission, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Human Impact Partners.

Katherine is a Certified Nurse Midwife with a long-held commitment to health equity and social justice. She is the Policy Director for the Neighborhood Birth Center, working to open Boston’s first birth center and increase access to midwifery care in the state. Prior to that, Katherine was the Associate Chief of Midwifery at Massachusetts General Hospital successfully leading programs to address the social determinants of health and expanding family planning, including abortion services, to community health centers. Katherine was among the first midwives to be appointed as teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School. Katherine is a past-president of the Massachusetts Affiliate of the American College of Nurse Midwives and currently serves as the Legislative Co-Chair. Katherine completed her midwifery education at Yale University and her BA in Women’s Studies/Anthropology at Barnard College. In 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow in the American College of Nurse Midwives for her contributions to the field of midwifery.