Fall in
love with
Awaken
LOVE

Awaken LOVE is a debut creative collaboration between poet Leseliey Rose and artist Stephanie Holloway. Featuring 15 poems paired with original abstract art, this intimate, first-edition hardcover collection explores love as a force for healing, connection, and justice. Awaken LOVE is perfect for poetry lovers, art enthusiasts, social justice advocates, and anyone seeking inspiration, comfort, or a reminder of our shared humanity.

Leseliey Welch, MPH, MBA

Leseliey Welch is a public health strategist, social entrepreneur, writer, and professional dreamer whose guiding value is Love. As a founder of Birth Detroit and Birth Center Equity, her work is grounded in making communities stronger, healthier, and more free – starting with ensuring all people have access to all safe birth options. Birth Detroit opened Detroit’s first freestanding community birth center in 2024. Birth Center Equity is a national effort to invest in Black, Indigenous, people of color-led birth centers at scale to make midwifery care a real option in all communities. Leseliey has two decades of leadership experience in city, state, and national health organizations, including having served as Deputy Director of Public Health for the City of Detroit. She is the vision behind National Birth Center Week and the collective impact initiative Beloved Birth 50 by 50. She is also a poet and an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow.

Leseliey is celebrating a new creative milestone this month with the Valentine’s Day debut of her poetry chapbook Awaken LOVE. A creative collaboration between Leseliey and her wife, abstract artist Stephanie Holloway, Awaken LOVE is a message to the Love in every heart, exploring hope, faith, creativity and courage.

Beloved Birth 50 by 50

Beloved Birth 50 by 50 (BB50x50) is a 25 year initiative to shift the US from a birth culture that is physician centric, hospital anchored, and rooted in hierarchy, to a culture of Beloved Birth — a birth culture that is family centered, midwife-led with physician collaboration, respects the dignity of all people, and values both midwife and physician credentials. BB50x50 centers the bold and audacious goal: By 2050, 50% of babies in the US will come into the world with the care of midwives. Launched in 2025, BB50x50 invites birth justice leaders and the general public alike to pledge to support the Beloved Birth 50 By 50 goal with our voices, ideas, and actions. In 2026, an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders will shape a 25-year strategic BB50by50 Blueprint across six pathways:

Finance: Make midwifery a top public & private financing priority
Grow Birth Centers: Grow access to birth centers – the only health care facilities that center the midwifery model of care
Workforce: Resource midwifery as the backbone of the birth care workforce
Integration: Center midwifery as optimal birth care across birth settings
Strength Policy & Regulations: Guarantee that policies & regulations support midwifery
Move Millions of Heart & Minds: Harness the power of culture, narrative, and story to grow demand for and access to midwifery care.

We have to tell a new story of birth in the US, one that celebrates the wisdom of midwives and the profound potential of physiologic birth to improve how we are born and how we live. Learn more and take the pledge at belovedbirth50by50.org

Beloved Birth 50 by 50

Birth Center Equity (BCE)

Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

Birth Center Equity (BCE) is a national catalyst for community birth center development that invests in Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led birth centers to grow and sustain community birth infrastructure for generations. We are a team of birth center founders and owners, midwives, cultural strategists, public health, and business professionals working to amplify the collective identity and power of community birth center leaders by growing a relationship-based network grounded in shared vision and values.

BCE focuses on four strategic priorities:

Community: Amplifying the collective identity and power of birth center leaders.
Capital: Making strategic investments as a “by us, for us” grant-maker with deep field expertise.
Catalyst: Advancing sustainability through business and leadership development.
Culture: Using narrative to inspire a culture that values birth centers as essential birth infrastructure.

Since its inception in 2020, BCE has raised and invested more than $9.8M in community birth infrastructure. The BCE network has grown to include 58 Black, Indigenous, people of color-led birth centers in varying stages of development, including 20 that are established and providing on-site birth care and 38 that are seeking resources to open and provide on-site birth care. Together BCE network birth centers care for thousands of families per year.

BCE envisions a world where all people birth safely in dignity and love; and midwives, families, and communities of color thrive. BCE founded and hosts National Birth Center Week (September 14-20). BCE is also designing a business studio to launch in 2026 and working on its first municipal birth center project collaboration.

BIRTHCENTEREQUITY.ORG

Birth Center Equity

Birth Detroit

Co-Founder

More Than a Birth Center: The Birth Detroit Care Campus

“Imagine birthing in a community birth center designed in response to the hopes, dreams, and needs of the community it calls home. Imagine safe, quality, loving care for yourself and for your growing family. Imagine Birth Detroit.”

Birth Detroit is a Black-led nonprofit organization with a mission to midwife safe, quality, loving care through pregnancy birth and beyond. Birth Detroit is a justice response to poor birth outcomes and inequitable care options in our communities. Our vision is a world where birth is safe, sacred, loving and celebrated for everyone.

Birth Detroit has been working since 2018 to make midwives and birth centers a real option for Black birthing people in our communities – and it is finally happening. We opened our first neighborhood-based midwifery clinic on Detroit’s northwest side in October 2020, and since then our team has provided prenatal care, postpartum care, ultrasounds, labs, childbirth education, infant CPR, and doula support services to hundreds of families. Together with generous donors, partners, and community members, we also raised $4M dollars, purchased land in the city, and started building. We cut the ribbon on phase one of our brand new birth center on October 13, 2024, opening the city’s first freestanding community birth center and the first of its kind Black-led birth center in Michigan. Our first Birth Detroit Birth Center baby was born in February 2025.

We are proud of these accomplishments – and there is more. Birth Detroit is more than a Birth Center. We intend to demonstrate how Black-led midwifery clinics and birth centers can be valuable assets not only to birthing people and families but also to our communities, health systems and our economy. By 2030, our multi-acre site will be home to the Birth Detroit Care Campus, growing from building one housing phase one of the birth center to additional buildings doubling the birth center in size, providing space for values-aligned care providers and partners, and developing a midwifery education and training center.

BIRTHDETROIT.COM

Birth Detroit

Writing

Speaking

BOOK ME

The University of Michigan, Ford School Towsley Policymaker in Residence Dr. Abdul El-Sayed discusses reproductive and birth justice with the Co-founder of Birth Detroit and Birth Center Equity, and former Deputy Director of the Detroit Health Department, Leseliey Welch. October 2022.

Aspen Ignites: Conversations to Build a Better World is an original series from the Aspen Institute, bringing together influential voices and diverse perspectives with Institute directors and partners. This season of Aspen Ignites was recorded at the 2023 Bloomberg CityLab.

To expand on their inspiring vision and the barriers they overcame like many other leaders of color on the same path, Welch sits down with the Managing Director of Ascend at the Aspen Institute Marjorie Sims for the inaugural episode of Aspen Ignites Season 2.

ASPEN VISIONXCHANGE 2023
VisionXChange centers the Aspen Institute Ascend Fellows in provocative and inspirational conversations about transforming our nation’s hearts, minds, policies, and practices to ensure all children and families thrive. At the opening session Leseliey Welch shares about birth and beloved economy.

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want Lecture & Community Conversation with Author, Dr. Ruha Benjamin. Facilitated by Mrs. Leseliey Welch.

Dr. Ruha Benjamin discusses her newest book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. In this talk, Dr.

Benjamin draws on the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and introduces a micro-vision of change—a way of looking at the everyday ways people are working to combat unjust systems and build alternatives to the oppressive status quo. Welch shares about the everyday ways Birth Detroit and Birth Center Equity are caring for families and creating community-led care systems.

Sponsored by: University of Michigan School of Public Health, School of Information, and the Ross School of Business.