The Neighborhood Birth Center is Eager to Bear Fruit

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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. Editorial Manager Alula Hunsen reports back on Birth Center as they get ready to finally break ground on a physical facility, making good on their promise to birthing people and the communities that support them.

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. Life teems in spring’s welcoming sunlight. 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;

8. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression;

6. We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.

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 provide care for community members outside of hospital facilities, lives on.

The parcels which will soon hold The Neighborhood Birth Center, Boston’s first standalone birth center, may seem appropriately chosen: in a life-affirming pocket of Roxbury, tucked just feet away from Warren Street and a stone’s throw from both Boston Medical Center and the Longwood Medical multiplex, life-affirming care, too, may take root. Founder and executive director Nashira Baril has written and spoken towards an inclusive dream of shifting maternal health outcomes for Black women, and for all people. She shared in an interview for this article that the goal is “reclaim[ing] midwifery through birth center care as an evidence-based strategy to in fact improve maternal and reproductive health” while also addressing the historical exclusion of Black midwifery and Black-led, femme-led approaches to care, and equitably increasing access to midwifery. The Neighborhood Birth Center seeks to intervene at the level of structures, systems, and the built environment: instead of reproducing the hospital as a dominant and dominating mode of healthcare, it seeks to produce care designed by and for women of color, from the ground-up. That framing places the Birth Center in a longer lineage of community-based interventions that have sought to challenge institutional models of care while restoring dignity and agency to those often underserved by them (1). Other reporting, including in the Boston Globe and GBH, has made clear why birth centers matter and traces the maternal health inequities that make them urgent. This piece turns toward a related and less examined question: what it takes, materially and collectively, to build one.

The Neighborhood Birth Center partnered with 5 movement-based organizations in Boston, similarly committed to challenging dominant modes of organizing people and spaces in an effort to undertake building their physical space. Under the broader Boston Liberatory Space Council, the Birth Center and its partners formed the Community Movement Commons (1) in 2021 to fundraise, organize, and create permanently affordable gathering and meeting space for base-building groups serving Roxbury.

Past coverage in the Banner and in GBH details how the Birth Center, as part of the Community Movement Commons, undertook fundraising, community outreach, and an extensive search process before finding parcels of land that fit their needs, including multiple trips to the Zoning Board to secure a variance to build a “retail” building on parcels zoned for housing. Community engagement unfolded through neighborhood partnerships, public gatherings, and a participatory arts project. The Birth Center/CMC shared plans with neighborhood-rooted partners like Reclaim Roxbury, Roxbury Path Forward, and the Roxbury Neighborhood Council, and hosted dinners and kickbacks on the parcels that would become the Birth Center, (including an event series called, “Wednesdays on Winthrop”). Participatory arts projects designed by engagement consultant Shaw Pong Liu, invited residents into conversation about the Birth Center using music, storytelling and poetry to, as Liu described it, “talk about joy in a community context” and carry that energy symbolically into the future home of the Birth Center. A community-made quilt, stewarded by Liu and designed and woven by L’Merchie Frazier, collects perspectives on joy, life, and care offered by community members as well as from voices gathered during Roxbury Open Streets (with support from youth narrative workers with Sisters Unchained). The quilt’s intention is to bring “the human capacity to extend care” via more than 100 panels—handmade by community members—into the interior design and atmos of the material building. Rather than treating engagement as a preliminary step before construction, these projects position community participation as part of the architecture of the Birth Center itself.

Images provided by Shaw Pong Liu. Left and right: from "Wrapped in Love," a community event held at Roxbury YMCA on July 10th, 2025 (photo credit: Stefanie Belnavis | Birthlooms). Center: from the Quilt Unveiling Reception at MASS Design Group on December 11th, 2025 (photo credit: Dante Luna)

Still, the Birth Center and Community Movement Commons’ initial proposal was denied by the Boston Zoning Board of Appeals last February, surfacing tensions around housing, development, and community control. Residents raised concerns about housing needs and whether the development was sufficiently resident-led. After addressing key concerns, including adding green space and parking, shrinking the building envelope, and deciding to move forward with the Birth Center on its own while retaining housing at 23 Kearsarge Ave,the Birth Center re-submitted and was approved in December. Following a 90-day comment period that drew no objections from abutting owners, the Birth Center is now officially moving forward.

The Neighborhood Birth Center is partnering with MASS to design their new building. Design director Ana Fernandez reflected that, “healthcare spaces have been designed around control and liability but not really around trust or prioritizing the human experience,” as the impetus for the Birth Center to imagine healthcare spaces differently. Birthing suites inside the building will center flexibility and agency for birthing families, with movable furniture and fixtures meant to respond to the needs of each birthing family. Wood panelling, mineral-based paints, cast-carbon tiles, and other natural materials will fill interior and exterior spaces, in contrast to synthetic or metallic surfaces commonly found in hospital space. Per Fernandez, this emerged in part from asking, “what should the first breath of a newborn contain?” A hearth-like space will sit in the center of the building, “meant for families to gather, with a kitchen area, a small living room, and a three season porch facing Winthrop Street.”

Images provided and produced by MASS

Fernandez also shared that MASS spent significant time researching Roxbury’s varied and distinct building styles, hoping to replicate the gabled roofs and lap siding common in the neighborhood. “We always understood this project was never a standalone object,” she said, “It has always been understood and conceived as part of a neighborhood fabric of care in Roxbury.” Plans include a birth garden, and unfenced front and side yards for community access, adding continuity between the Winthrop Community Garden across the street and Boston Day and Evening Academy’s garden, adjacent to 23 Kearsarge, which beckons planting, seating, leisure-seeking. Dedicated parking for guests and staff will be located on-site as well. MASS is planning to work with local artists to ensure the building reflects local identities and modes of cultural production (starting with the quilt produced during community engagement). MASS is also working with local general contractors Janey Construction during the design and construction phases of the Neighborhood Birth Center.

Policy has influenced the design of the Neighborhood Birth Center, as well. Baril worked with Bay State Birth Coalition and representatives at the State House, including State Senator Liz Miranda, to help advance legislation expanding access to midwifery care and out-of-hospital birth options. Passed in 2024 as part of the maternal health “Momnibus,” this new law, An Act promoting access to midwifery care and out-of-hospital birth options and signed by Governor Healey, allows the Neighborhood Birth Center to elide spatial regulation as an outpatient facility, instead building according to new Department of Public Health standards specific to birthing centers. It also enables licensure for birthing professionals like midwives, raises mandated pay disbursed by insurance to midwives and doulas, and makes clearer the path towards women-led care models for birthing people that challenge the primacy, and failures, of hospital care. “[B]y creating pathways to licensure for midwives and lactation consultants, expanding mental health resources, and ensuring comprehensive support through MassHealth,” Miranda shares, “we honor the strength of individuals who turned their pain into policy. Their courage has paved the way for a more inclusive and supportive system, particularly for our most vulnerable constituents and communities of color”

The Neighborhood Birth Center’s new plans will still be supported by the Community Movement Commons, though in evolved form. After the original proposal for zoning relief was denied, Baril and partners began imagining what they now call a movement archipelago: a distributed model with one site for the Birth Center, one for affordable housing, and another for gathering, performance, and organizing space elsewhere in Roxbury for the rest of the Commons.

The archipelago will allow the Birth Center to focus its funds on building its new home at 14 Winthrop and 23 Kearsarge without having to buy out the Community Movement Commons (who owns the land together); instead, the CMC will license the land to the Birth Center for a nominal amount. The archipelago will also provide the Community Movement Commons with an opportunity to work with community-based partners who already own land and would be willing to lease it to CMC, saving all partners money and ensuring the development of the Community Movement Commons proceeds in closer partnership with community members and organizations which already have a connection to land in Roxbury. Jasmine Gomez, Co-Director of Radical Philanthropy at Resist and a key organizer with the Community Movement Commons, shared, “"The land-licensing agreement affirms land as a collectively stewarded resource that advances interdependence, community self-determination, and the long-term sustainability of movement work. It reflects a commitment to mutual support, resource sharing, and coordinated care—ensuring that each organization’s presence on the land strengthens the whole ecosystem and expands collective capacity for justice, healing, and liberation."

The Neighborhood Birth Center still has to raise additional funds to begin building and becoming operational, particularly as it now shoulders construction costs independently while also raising capital to pay midwives equitably before opening. Nevertheless, the Birth Center is pressing on: they are completing interviews to hire a new clinical director, and are beginning demolition and breaking ground in May. So, too, is the Community Movement Commons. Gomez said, “We're looking at additional spaces that are already owned by community, to either build new or to renovate a building within a community-led process–within the design as well as within the governance…we want to make sure that we're including resident voices on our governance circle,” building in direct levers for community control and benefit. Preliminary plans for their new building have already been drafted by design partners at Co.Everything, according to Gomez, including gathering areas, a community kitchen supporting narrative production and cultural exchange, a large auditorium opening into green space, a community kitchen to support cultural exchange, and offices for grassroots orgs, all intended to bring movements and community members into closer relationships.

Baril shared, “We were only able to come out with the archipelago idea because we had been dreaming together and massaging this idea for years. We took [our plan’s zoning dismissal last year] on the chin and for a moment, I was curled up in everybody's laps crying…and then we figured out a beautiful, more abundant, way forward.”

The Ujima Press WIRE will continue to follow this story, and others, tracking how communities build alternative institutions and how new social and structural forms emerge through their work.

(1) An article entitled, “Death of 4-Month-Old Baby” on page 9 of the February 7th, 1970 issue of The Black Panther, instigating the development of People’s Free Medical Clinics including the Franklin Lynch People’s Free Heath Center, details how hospital systems fail the Black community via coverage of medical racism that led to the devastating losses of infant life and mistreatment of Black mothers within extant medical infrastructure. Writing in the Commonwealth Beacon in 2024, Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, Tiffany Vassell, and Jo-Anna Rorie emphasize that these inequities in Massachusetts have not been adequately addressed, and that a crisis is present–and not just for Black birthing people, but for all birthing families, statewide.

(2) The Community Movement Commons is a partnership between six organizations, including: Neighborhood Birth Center, Movement Sustainability Commons, Sisters Unchained, Resist, Center for Economic Democracy, and Matahari Women Workers' Center.

This article was guest-edited by Emmy Liu. Emmy Liu is an editor and writer whose work centers on meaningful exchange—how ideas move between people, how meaning is created, and how it is made and felt. She works at the intersection of art, language, and culture. She’s worked for Milk.xyz, Mission Magazine, and Boston Art Review.