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birth justice Sustainability Hub

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The Birth Justice Sustainability Hub is a network of fiscally sponsored projects working towards liberation through a birth justice framework. Comprised of community-rooted and led organizations from across the US, including Puerto Rico, these projects span a variety of thematic areas including uplifting the midwifery model of care, doula support, parenting and childcare support, healing from the impacts of family policing and other forms of separation, reimagining research and policy, and much more.

In the last two years, the Hub has doubled in size, entirely through word of mouth. This showcases the deep desire our movement has for fiscal sponsors who are values aligned, and who are reimagining what this type of partnership can look and feel like.

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Our approach

Our Movement Building work strives to increase innovation in the field and redistribute legal and financial resources by supporting infrastructure for emerging projects and ideas, especially those that are community-based and led by people who are directly impacted.

We recognize that businesses of all kinds, including non-profits often replicate systems and processes that uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, and inequities. Fiscal sponsorship is particularly vulnerable to these patterns since it involves business formation with the added complexity of tax law.

Our goal is to do fiscal sponsorship in a way that lessens the barriers to entry for innovative projects, interrupts white supremacy systems, and demonstrates alternative ways of managing change, risk, and power. We believe that people who have been excluded from or neglected by the status quo, and who are directly impacted and most proximate to the problem, hold some of the most important ideas and solutions, and need legal, tax and accounting systems to work for them. We leverage our legal, tax and accounting infrastructure, combine it with our birth justice expertise, and collaborate with mission-aligned people like you to create a hub that can sustain our collective work.

The strength of our movement is supported through the endurance of our connections.

In addition to the operational and administrative responsibilities we provide, Elephant Circle feels it is equally important to grow and tend to the capacity and skills of our Hub members. We do this through ongoing relationship and trust building between Hub members, virtual convenings, teach-in series and webinars, access to digital tools and resources, and a connection to Elephant Circle’s broader network.

Our why

Prior to incorporation in 2018, Elephant Circle was fiscally sponsored for nine years. During this time, we learned a lot about what a fiscally sponsored project needs to feel supported during such a transformative and incubatory phase. We see fiscal sponsorship as a key part of movement building and sustainability, and our mission.