Meet Birthing Beautiful Communities founder Christin Farmer: Saving the Smallest
This reporting is supported by the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism National Fellowship. Other stories in this series include:
Christin Farmer, 31, knew she wanted to be a doula-- or birth attendant-- since her teen years. In 2015, she launched Birthing Beautiful Communities with a handful of other African American women determined to bring down their community's high infant mortality rate by providing the support of doula services-- free of charge-- throughout pregnancy and the first year of baby's life. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)
CLEVELAND, Ohio-- Christin Farmer knew she wanted to help women have babies at 16, when she watched an episode of TLC's "A Baby Story" and saw a midwife with a birthing center delivering babies.
"I remember it was so nice, the care the mothers received," she says. "It was this sort of holistic care and celebrating birth and letting women take control of their bodies. That really resonated with me."
For the next five years she read everything she could find on pregnancy, midwifery and doulas.
But when it came time to deliver her own child, while a junior at Kent State University, Farmer didn't have a doula. She couldn't afford one (most charge between $1,000 and $2,500 just to attend labor and delivery), and she wasn't even sure how to go about finding one if she could afford it.
Her delivery was not a positive experience. She didn't want drugs but ended up using an epidural after feeling pressured by a nurse.
It's the reason why Farmer, now 31 and the founder of Birthing Beautiful Communities (BBC), a nonprofit that trains and provides doulas at no cost to help reduce the infant mortality rate in the black community in Northeast Ohio, makes sure the women her group serves are always in control.
Christin Farmer, founder of the nonprofit Birthing Beautiful Communities, carries 2-month-old Knoelle Holmes, whose birth was attended by a BBC doula, before a free weekly class at the organization's offices in Cleveland in July. (Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer)
Farmer, who grew up in Hough and now lives in nearby Glenville, formed BBC in 2015 after finding no local doula training specifically geared for black women serving the black community.
"They had one in Portland, in Kansas City, in New Orleans... why isn't there one in Cleveland?" she remembers asking. She received a traditional training and certification here in April of 2015, and when asked what her future plans were at her graduation ceremony, told her instructor she was going to create a "commune of black birth workers" in Cleveland.
At the core of that commune of BBC doulas is a group of three women who have been with Farmer the longest--Verna Darby, Khalilah Williams and Nakia Smith. All four, including Farmer, left full-time jobs to join BBC when the organization was in its infancy.
"These are some of the most dedicated women I've met in my life," Farmer says. "I just had a vision, but they trusted me with their livelihoods."
Her team, and the babies they usher into the world, are what keeps Farmer going in the face of the enormity of the problems she sees women and children facing in Cleveland neighborhoods -- problems such as inequities in wealth, housing and education, and the pervasive effects of racism.
"At some point you might feel like 'What's the point of living?' It's just so much," Farmer says. "But then the fight in me says 'No.' I'm going to figure out something, do something to change this.
I don't have it in me to give up."
[This story was originally published by Cleveland.com]