Fundraising, Alignment, and Accountability

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 Community (2015) explains that community collaboratives need sustained commitment from multiple stakeholders around a shared purpose. Drath et al. (2008) describe leadership as a process of creating shared direction, alignment, and commitment. This helped me think about fundraising as more than a transaction. Fundraising should clarify the direction of the work, align supporters with the mission, and create accountability for how resources are used.

For SweetGrass, the direction is clear: reduce barriers to culturally grounded perinatal care, support families across pregnancy and postpartum, and strengthen the community-based birthwork ecosystem. The alignment comes from making sure funders, donors, partners, members, and advisors understand what SweetGrass is building and why it matters. The accountability comes from being transparent about where money goes, what it supports, and how it impacts families and providers.

One important lesson we are learning is that grants should not be the entire funding strategy. Ideally, grants would make up only a portion of SweetGrass’s income, around 30%, while the rest comes from diversified community-based and mission-aligned revenue streams. So far, much of our funding has come through collaboration, relationship, community trust, and consistent community presence.

That matters because it shows that SweetGrass is not only funder-facing; it is rooted in relationships with the people and partners who already believe in the work.

This has pushed us to explore fundraising strategies that do not shift the full cost of care onto participants. Many of the families SweetGrass hopes to serve already face financial barriers to midwifery care, doula support, lactation services, childbirth education, and postpartum support. If sustainability depends only on charging families more, then the model would reproduce the same access barriers it was created to address. Our goal is to build revenue streams that support the work while keeping services as accessible as possible.

One avenue we are exploring is Community Supported Agriculture. This aligns with SweetGrass’s values around food as medicine, family wellness, and community-based care. A CSA partnership creates a way to support maternal and family wellness while also generating revenue through a mission-aligned collaboration. This kind of fundraising feels different from simply asking for donations because it builds community participation, supports food access, and connects wellness to land, nourishment, and sustainability.

Another avenue is training for providers, doulas, and birthworkers. SweetGrass has knowledge, experience, and a strong community-centered framework that can be shared through trainings on topics such as trauma-informed care, cultural humility, lactation, reproductive justice, full-spectrum support, and community-based perinatal care. Provider trainings could create earned revenue while also strengthening the larger birthwork ecosystem. This feels aligned because it not only funds the organization; it expands capacity in the community.

The Community Birth Fund remains one of the clearest fundraising priorities. This fund would help reduce financial barriers for families seeking midwifery care, doula support, lactation support, childbirth education, and postpartum care. The fund is aligned with SweetGrass’s mission because it directly increases access. However, it also requires accountability. We need clear eligibility guidelines, a transparent distribution process, tracking, and reporting so donors can trust the fund and families can access support without shame or confusion.

A second fundraising priority is infrastructure. This includes Casebook, HIPAA-compliant documentation, intake systems, evaluation tools, outreach materials, and insurance. These items may not seem as emotionally compelling as direct family support, but they are necessary for protecting privacy, tracking outcomes, coordinating referrals, and showing impact. Fundraising for infrastructure requires helping supporters understand that strong systems are part of ethical care.

A third priority is provider and leadership compensation. Community-based care work is often underpaid or unpaid, especially when led by women, birthworkers, and people of color. If SweetGrass is committed to equity, then fundraising must eventually support stipends, honoraria, and contractor payments. Otherwise, the work risks reproducing the same extractive patterns it is trying to challenge.

This week, I connected with the Birth Center Advocacy Workgroup, where we discussed upcoming meetings with Med-QUEST about Medicaid coverage for midwives. Through my role on the board of Breastfeeding Hawaiʻi, I have also been part of conversations about Medicaid coverage for lactation providers. These conversations helped me see that fundraising cannot be separated from policy and reimbursement structures. Philanthropy and community-generated funding can help fill gaps, but long-term sustainability also requires systems-level change so families are not forced to pay out of pocket for essential perinatal care.

These conversations also helped me think about accountability in a broader way. SweetGrass can fundraise for birth support, lactation care, and community-based services, but we also have to stay aligned with advocacy efforts that address why these services are financially inaccessible in the first place. If Medicaid reimbursement pathways expand for midwives and lactation providers, families would have more access, providers would be better compensated, and community-based organizations like SweetGrass could focus less on filling structural gaps and more on strengthening care coordination, education, and culturally grounded support.

Based on this reflection, I would organize SweetGrass’s fundraising plan into four parts. First, we need a Community Birth Fund campaign focused on direct family support. Second, we need an infrastructure campaign focused on Casebook, insurance, evaluation, and administrative systems, and ensuring we can keep these components active and compliant. Third, we need mission-aligned earned revenue through CSA partnerships, provider trainings, workshops, and educational collaborations. Fourth, we need a sustainability campaign focused on compensating providers, committee leads, facilitators, and leadership roles.

I also think fundraising should be relational and community-centered, not performative. SweetGrass does not need to present families’ struggles in an extractive way to prove that the work matters. We can communicate urgency while still protecting dignity. We can share stories of impact without turning people’s pain into marketing. This is part of accountability too: being accountable not only to donors, but to the families and communities whose experiences make the work necessary.

This week helped me understand that fundraising is a leadership practice. It requires vision, communication, trust-building, and follow-through. It also requires discernment. Not every funding opportunity will be aligned with the mission. Some funding may come with expectations that could shift the work away from community priorities. Commitment, alignment, and accountability mean being clear about what SweetGrass will accept, what it will refuse, and how it will remain rooted in its values.

For SweetGrass, fundraising is not only about survival. It is about building a sustainable structure for community care. If done well, fundraising can bring people into shared responsibility for maternal and child health equity. It can help families access care, help providers continue their work, and help the Collective grow without shifting the burden onto the very families it was created to support.

References

Drath, W. H., McCauley, C. D., Palus, C. J., Van Velsor, E., O’Connor, P. M., & McGuire, J. B. (2008). Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(6), 635–653. https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/leadership/The_Directional_alignment_commitment.pdf

Leadership Learning Community. (2015, June). Leadership & large-scale change: How to accelerate learning and deepen impact. https://leadershiplearning.org/publications/leadership-large-scale-change/