The Northern Birthwork Collective: Improving Birthing Experiences in the Northwest Territories
26 May 2022
By: Sharlene Wolbeck Minke, Practice Affiliate, Centre for Healthy Communities and Sabrina Flack, Project Director, Northern Birthwork Collective
Centre for Healthy Communities Practice Affiliate, Sharlene Wolbeck Minke, SWM Consulting Services, has been working with Sabrina Flack, Project Director of Northern Birthwork Collective to integrate evaluation into its operations. The aim is to enable NBC to understand its progress in key areas that will strengthen the organization’s capacity to support reproductive justice.
Founded in the fall of 2020, the Northern Birthwork Collective (NBC) is a team of reproductive justice advocates (including birthworkers [1], parents, and community members) who are committed to creating safer spaces, programming and services for pregnant people in the Northwest Territories (NT) [2]. Their work is grounded in a deep understanding of intersectional determinants of health, such as historical trauma and racism, that shape the perinatal experiences of many Indigenous birthing people in the NT.
With a strong commitment to learning and improvement, NBC recognized the value of embedding evaluation into its processes from the beginning. Centre for Healthy Communities Practice Affiliate Sharlene Wolbeck Minke, SWM Consulting Services, began working with Sabrina Flack, Project Director of NBC, in early 2021 to collaboratively develop an evaluation approach that would strengthen NBC’s capacity to provide families, pregnant and birthing people from underserved communities in NT access to holistic and dignified birthing support.
With a shared commitment to participatory processes, health promotion principles, and evaluation for learning, Sabrina and Sharlene developed an evaluation framework and tools to capture NBC’s development in five core areas of health promotion action (see Table 1). Learnings from the core aspects cross-cut and inform the priority programs and services:
- Indigenous Birthwork Training
- Birthwork Support
- Community Care: Evacuation for Birth Support Program
The NBC practice example showcases the value of listening to community and ensuring participatory evaluation is built-in to program processes from the start.
Through learning-focused evaluation of its health promotion actions, NBC will understand if their responses are meeting the communities’ expressed priorities. They will continually strengthen their capacity to generate evidence about the reach (who is engaged) and impacts of their work. Evaluation evidence will enable NBC to report to funders with accuracy, develop new funding proposals, and answer questions that will inform program planning and development. In other words, the evidence NBC generates through evaluation will enable the collective to confidently communicate its contribution to positive birth experiences for pregnant people and their families in NT.
[1] Birthworkers (or Birth Keepers/Aunties, Doulas) are trained professionals who support families and individuals during pregnancy, birth, postpartum, abortion, miscarriage and loss by providing emotional, spiritual, physical and informational support. They are advocates for their clients wishes, and support them to have more confident and empowered experiences.