Webinar Wednesday: Midwifing Space: Advancing Architecture and Policy for Healing Spaces
Space is never neutral. The way we design birth, and healthcare spaces generally, reflects what we value—how we center families' voices and choices, how we harmonize safety and dignity, and how we honor culture and identity.
In this webinar, Nashira Baril and Katherine Rushfirth of Boston’s Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC), will be joined by their architect, Amie Shao, of MASS Design Group, to share reflections from their partnership, including:
- A human-centered, trauma-informed, co-design process
- Principles for designing affirming, safe, and culturally reverent birth spaces
- Regulatory challenges and pathways to policy change
NBC’s approach demonstrates how spatial design, community engagement, policy advocacy, and grassroots organizing can create a sustainable, replicable, and scalable model for birth equity.
Presenters
Nashira Baril, Executive Director & Founder of Neighborhood Birth Center
Nashira (she/her), is the daughter and great-granddaughter of midwives. She experienced firsthand the sacred care of midwives at the home births of her siblings in the 80s and her own two children in 2013 and 2017. These births transformed her worldview and put her on a path to see the vision of elder midwives who first dreamt of a birth center in Roxbury in the 1980s.
Nashira holds a master’s degree in Maternal and Child Health from Boston University School of Public Health, and has over 20 years of experience designing and implementing public health strategies to advance racial equity. Founded in 2015, Neighborhood Birth Center will be the first-of-its-kind community birth center in Boston, providing community midwifery to strategically address the maternal health crisis.
Nashira feels most free when walking barefoot in the grass or jumping in a cold lake. She lives with her family and rescue pup in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Pawtucket, Massa-adchu-esset, Pokanoket, and the Wampanoag people.
Katherine Rushfirth, CNM, FACNM, Associate Director of Neighborhood Birth Center
Katherine (she/her) is a Certified Nurse Midwife with a long-held commitment to health equity and social justice. She is the Associate Director for the Neighborhood Birth Center, working to open Boston’s first birth center and increase access to midwifery care in the state. She was a leader in the advocacy effort behind Massachusetts’ trailblazing Maternal Health Omnibus that passed in 2024.
Katherine completed her midwifery education at Yale University and her BA in Women’s Studies/Anthropology at Barnard College. Prior to her time with NBC, Katherine was the Associate Chief of Midwifery at Massachusetts General Hospital. She successfully led programs to address the social determinants of health and expanding family planning, including abortion services, to community health centers. Katherine was among the first midwives to be appointed as teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School.
Katherine is a past-president of the Massachusetts Affiliate of the American College of Nurse Midwives and currently serves as the Legislative Co-Chair. She is the Secretary for national ACNM’s Government Affairs Committee. In 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow in the American College of Nurse Midwives for her contributions to the field of midwifery.
Katherine lives in Lynn with her husband and their two small children.
Amie Shao, Architect of Neighborhood Birth Center
Amie Shao is a Principal at MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society), where she leads the Maternal & Newborn Health Design Lab. Her work is aimed at championing the design of safe and culturally reverent childbirth spaces and fostering awareness around how spaces shape healing, equity and dignity.
Blending human-centered practices with evidence-based research, she has designed childbirth facilities in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Kenya; evaluated the impact of maternity waiting homes in Malawi; and collaborated with Ariadne Labs to investigate how birth environments influence cesarean rates. Amie is currently partnering with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement on Delivering More, a human-centered design toolkit for co-creating safe and respectful birth spaces in low- and middle-income countries. She is also leading design efforts for the Neighborhood Birth Center in Boston, advancing reproductive and racial justice through community-based, culturally grounded midwifery care.
For More Information:
3123 Gottschall RoadPerkiomenville, Pennsylvania 18074
United States 215.234.8068