Leadership Project

Strengthening the SweetGrass Wellness Collective

Overview

My leadership project focuses on supporting the growth and sustainability of the SweetGrass Wellness Collective, a community-rooted perinatal wellness collective based in Hawaiʻi. SweetGrass centers Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, LGBTQIA2+, military-connected, and historically underserved families through culturally grounded, trauma-informed, and community-based care.

The Collective brings together midwives, doulas, lactation professionals, educators, cultural workers, mental health providers, and community advocates to strengthen access to perinatal support across pregnancy, birth, postpartum, infant feeding, and early parenting. Rather than functioning as a traditional top-down organization, SweetGrass is being built as a relational care network rooted in shared responsibility, cultural humility, reproductive justice, and community accountability.

This project is about creating the structure needed to sustain that vision.

Project Goals

The primary goal of this leadership project is to help SweetGrass move from emerging grassroots work into a more formalized, sustainable collective model without losing its community-rooted identity.

Specific goals include:

Strengthening the membership process and onboarding structure
Clarifying the role of the Advisory Council
Supporting the development of the Community Birth Fund
Creating systems for feedback, accountability, and shared agreements
Building infrastructure for documentation, referrals, evaluation, and sustainability
Expanding community partnerships and stakeholder engagement
Developing a fundraising and sustainability plan that does not shift the full cost of care onto families

Key Initiatives

Community Birth Fund

One of the central initiatives of this project is the development of the Community Birth Fund. This fund is designed to reduce financial barriers for families seeking midwifery care, doula support, lactation care, childbirth education, postpartum support, and culturally rooted wellness services.

The fund reflects a core belief of SweetGrass: families should not be excluded from community-based care because of cost.

Membership and Collective Structure

SweetGrass is also developing a stronger membership structure. This includes a membership application, onboarding process, handbook, shared agreements, code of conduct, and participation expectations.

The goal is not to create unnecessary hierarchy. Instead, the structure is intended to support clarity, accountability, collaboration, and sustainability.

Advisory Council

The Advisory Council serves as a source of wisdom, cultural guidance, accountability, and community perspective. I have often said that if it were legally possible, SweetGrass would have a council of grandmothers. Instead, we have an Advisory Council.

This council helps hold the work in alignment with the mission, values, and communities SweetGrass was created to serve.

Accountability and Feedback Systems

SweetGrass is developing processes for community feedback, grievance response, accessibility review, and inclusive communication. These systems are important because community care requires more than good intentions. It requires practices that support repair, transparency, trust, and shared responsibility.

Sustainability and Fundraising

Another major part of this project is sustainability planning. SweetGrass is exploring diversified funding streams, including grants, community-generated support, Community Supported Agriculture partnerships, provider trainings, educational workshops, and institutional partnerships.

The goal is to build financial sustainability without placing the full cost of care on participants.

Why This Project Matters

This project matters because maternal and child health care is often fragmented, expensive, and disconnected from the cultural and relational needs of families. Many families need more than clinical services. They need education, advocacy, lactation support, postpartum care, food access, emotional support, trusted referrals, and community connection.

SweetGrass was created to respond to these gaps.

By strengthening the Collective’s structure, this project supports a larger vision of birth and postpartum care as something that should be accessible, culturally grounded, trauma-informed, and held in community. It also supports the sustainability of birthworkers and community care providers who are often expected to do essential work without adequate compensation or infrastructure.

At its heart, this leadership project is about building a container for care. It is about creating enough structure for the work to be shared, sustained, and accountable, while still protecting the softness, relationship, and cultural grounding that make SweetGrass meaningful.

Membership and Collective Infrastructure

A major part of this leadership project was creating the internal infrastructure needed for SweetGrass to grow with clarity and accountability. This included developing the membership handbook, membership application, annual rededication process, community accountability work group, and community directory.

The membership handbook helped define SweetGrass’s mission, values, roles, expectations, shared agreements, code of conduct, and grievance process. The membership application created a clearer pathway for new members to join the Collective with intention and alignment. The rededication process gave existing members a way to annually recommit to the mission, reflect on their participation, and confirm continued alignment.

We also created a community accountability work group to support membership review, feedback, grievance response, accessibility, inclusive communication, and conflict navigation. This helped move accountability from an idea into practice.

Finally, the community directory helped make the Collective more visible and accessible by organizing members, services, roles, and areas of expertise in one place. Together, these tools created a stronger foundation for shared leadership, community trust, and sustainable growth.