Kuponya (to heal): A collective for the advancement of community-based midwifery, understands community-based midwifery as something deeply human—care that grows from the people, for the people, and with the people.

It is not just where care happens, but how it feels. It looks like trust built over time, shared language, familiar faces, and providers who understand not only clinical needs, but cultural rhythms, histories, and lived realities.

Culture Shift and Alignment

CPM Licensure and Practice Expansion

Expand Community-Rooted Midwifery Workforce

Medicaid Midwifery Reimbursement Model

Workforce Pipeline and Sustainability

In North Carolina, policy has long defined who is allowed to provide care, but community-based midwifery reminds us that access is not created by restriction, it is created by trust, proximity, and the right to be cared for where we live.

Kuponya is uniquely composed of women and nonbinary persons of color, justice movement leaders, community based midwives and birthworkers. We are who we serve! Guided by tradition of centering our voices and intersectionality, Kuponya displays it’s strategy and comfort with centering equity and lived experience by first honoring the collective memory of community midwifery to both base-build and culturally connect personal experience to advocacy and eventually policy change.

To practice midwifery in the spirit of Black feminism is to remember: our bodies are not sites of crisis, but of power, memory, and possibility, and birth is where that truth begins.

Together, we are cultivating more than providers—we are growing a community of healers. Community-based midwifery, to us, is a living, breathing ecosystem of care that restores power, honors tradition, and makes safe, respectful birth a reality for every family we touch.

We are midwives, doulas, birth assistants, educators, and advocates who create an ecosystem of care every day. We define a community midwife as someone accountable to the people, present in their homes, aware of their realities, and committed beyond birth itself. This ecosystem already exists: the birth assistant who becomes a doula, the doula who becomes a midwife, the midwife who mentors the next generation. Families are held across this continuum, even when systems fail them.

Together, we are cultivating more than providers, we are growing a community of healers.

Community-based midwifery, to us, is a living, breathing ecosystem of care that restores power, honors tradition, and makes safe, respectful birth a reality for every family we touch.