This quarter deepened my understanding that leadership is not defined by a title, personality, or ability to carry the most responsibility. Leadership is the ongoing practice of aligning values, relationships, decisions, and organizational structures. Before this course, I often understood leadership primarily through service, advocacy, and the ability to respond when something needed to be done. I still believe those qualities are important, but I now recognize that leadersh

Publication can play an important role in my work by helping preserve, evaluate, and share knowledge that is often developed within communities but never reaches traditional academic spaces. Much of the work of SweetGrass Wellness Collective is informed by community relationships, lived experience, participant feedback, and the ongoing process of learning what families actually need. Publishing this work could create a record of what was attempted, what was learned, and how p

This week’s focus on fundraising helped me think about money not only as a resource, but as a relationship. For the SweetGrass Wellness Collective, fundraising is not just about asking for support. It is about inviting people into a shared commitment to culturally rooted, community-based perinatal care in Hawaiʻi. The collaborative leadership competency for this week, “Commitment, Alignment, and Accountability,” is directly connected to fundraising. Leadership Learning Commun

This week’s collaborative leadership competency, Diverse Stakeholder Engagement, helped me think about who needs to be meaningfully involved in the growth of the SweetGrass Wellness Collective. Leadership Learning Community (2015) emphasizes that successful collaborative efforts require diverse stakeholders and that community members should not only be seen as clients, but as people with agency, expertise, and the ability to shape change. That point feels central to SweetGras

This week’s focus on budget development and financial management helped me think more practically about what it takes to sustain the SweetGrass Wellness Collective. I often think about SweetGrass through the lens of vision, community care, cultural rootedness, and reproductive justice, but this week reminded me that values need infrastructure. If the work is going to continue, then the budget has to reflect the mission. For SweetGrass, financial management is not just about t

This week’s focus on communication planning helped me think about how SweetGrass Wellness Collective tells its story to different audiences without losing the heart of the work. SweetGrass is not just a program offering perinatal services. It is a community-rooted model of care that connects families, birthworkers, lactation professionals, educators, cultural workers, and advocates around a shared vision of accessible, culturally grounded, trauma-informed perinatal support. T

This week’s focus on strategic planning helped me think more clearly about the role of structure in my SweetGrass leadership project. My project is centered on strengthening the SweetGrass Wellness Collective through organizational structure, including the membership process, advisory council, shared agreements, Community Birth Fund, feedback systems, Casebook implementation, and accountability processes. I see strategic planning as the bridge between vision and sustainabilit

This week’s portfolio prompt asks us to reflect on Indigenous cultures, traditional midwifery, and “wise women” models of leadership. The Lao Tzu quote, “Lead so the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge,” feels deeply connected to midwifery and to the leadership project we are developing through the SweetGrass Wellness Collective. For me, this quote is about reducing hierarchy. Leadership is not supposed to mean taking over, becoming the center, or deciding what so