The Neighborhood Birth Center Is Eager to Bear Fruit | Nonprofit Quarterly | Civic News. Empowering Nonprofits. Advancing Justice.

"The Neighborhood Birth Center has been in the making for a decade. Executive director and founder Nashira Baril has made it her mission to bring to life the first standalone birthing center in Boston, to redress frustrating maternal health outcomes in the Bay State and to produce care designed by and for women of color, from the ground-up."

"23 Kearsarge Avenue, 10, 14, and 18 Winthrop Street-four parcels in total that will soon constitute the Neighborhood Birth Center-are quiet around mid-day. A red house, white shed, and wide yard stretch over a sloping lot on Winthrop Street, at the base of a small hill that rises toward an enclave of homes, churches, two schools, and a garden."

"The Winthrop Community Garden sits immediately across the street from 14 Winthrop's red house at 23-25 Winthrop, imposing the legacy of the Boston Chapter of the Black Panther Party with super-sized weathered-steel gates, and marking the site of their Community Information Center (active in 1970). The Garden propounds the Panther's Ten-Point Plan, including: 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities;"

"The Boston Chapter set up the Franklin Lynch People's Free Heath Center in the same year, just a half-mile away, as part of a wave of free clinics set up by local chapters of the Panthers. Both centers closed within one year; still, the dream set forth by the Panthers, to instantiate and sustain alternative institutions that could adequately provi"

The Neighborhood Birth Center is being developed over ten years to create Boston’s first standalone birthing center. The project is led by founder and executive director Nashira Baril, with a mission to address poor maternal health outcomes in Massachusetts. The center is planned to provide care designed by and for women of color, built from the ground up. The future facility will occupy four parcels at 23 Kearsarge Avenue and 10, 14, and 18 Winthrop Street in Boston’s Winthrop area. The site is near the Winthrop Community Garden, which reflects the legacy of the Boston Chapter of the Black Panther Party and its Ten-Point Plan, including demands for freedom, an end to wars of aggression, and free health care for Black and oppressed people.

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