Support us in shifting the tides of midwifery

Tideshifts: A Midwifery Mentorship Collective is a year-long program designed to bridge the gaps left by current Western midwifery education and practice. Students and new midwives often feel isolated and unsupported as the navigate the dissonances between what brought them to the calling of midwifery and what the profession actually entails within capitalist, industrialized birth settings. Midwives face the relentless medicalization of birth, ongoing staff crises and overwork, a medical culture characterized by bullying, hazing, and incivility, unchallenged white supremacist belief systems, and both primary and secondary traumas. Occupation-related distress is a shared burden among midwives, regardless of where they work, exacerbated by the country’s resources, and the composition of the healthcare system and policies (Mayra et al 2023).

This is especially true for those whole hold identities or belong to backgrounds structurally marginalized and exploited, including but not limited to Black, Brown, Indigenous/People of the Global Majority, LGBTQIA+ folks, and those living with disabilities.

Tideshifts is meant to serve as a balm for the intergenerational wounds of the medical industrialization of midwifery. Facilitated by an experienced midwife who has worked in a variety of birth settings, the inaugural cohort of Tideshifts will share our strengths and challenges, review case and best practices, create deep and nourishing connections, challenge harmful conventions, and radically evolve as midwives and humans.

Midwifery is our collective past, and it is also our collective future.

It has been estimated that 83% of maternal deaths, stillbirths, and newborn deaths worldwide could be averted through expansion of midwifery care (The Lancet 2014). But midwives suffer from high levels of burnout; the average midwife practices only 7 years. We cannot improve others’ survival when we cannot survive more than a few years of midwifery ourselves. Tideshifts seeks to lay a foundation for students and new midwives that will help them build the resilience and supports necessary to do the work for years to come.

We need your help!

The full tuition for Tideshifts is priced at $3,600, which includes a full year of 1:1 mentorship, group support, clinical guidance, case reviews, and roundtable readings. In order to built a collective consistent with our values, at the outset we were committed to working to meet the financial needs of all participants. In this inaugural cohort of Tideshifts, 60% of applicants and 56% of admitted members applied for financial aid. Our financial aid application involved asking applicants to reflect critically on their own identities, backgrounds, resources, and generational supports and suggest the amount they were able to contribute to attend the program. No one was required to justify or provide proof of income for this amount.

Because accessibility, justice, and equity are key values inherent to the mission of Tideshifts, we committed at the outset to meeting the needs of a diverse community and reducing barriers to access. The collective is composed of 17 admitted members and 1 intern (who received a full scholarship in exchange for administrative support), and we are proud to share that everyone who applied for a scholarship was granted one. In fact, 95% of the total aid requested by the admitted cohort was granted. Scholarships were prioritized according to many intersections, but every single applicant for aid was granted a scholarship. Most were offered their required amount, and none were offered a package that required them contributing more than $300 above what they asked.

Your donations allow us to offer these kinds of generous package to this cohort and the cohorts to come, while also leaving this much-needed offering sustainable for Robina, who is herself a Pakistani-American midwife who is the sole income earner for her family of 6. Donors will receive quarterly updates about the work of Tideshifts, and the cohort they supported, as a thank you!