Last Updated on May 19, 2024 by BVN
May 10, 2024
For this Solutions Saturday —the day before Mother’s Day, we are sharing an early special message from our friends at GirlTREK for Black mothers and the people who love them. As they recommend, “Ask every Black woman you know to take a walk this weekend in honor of a woman whose footsteps she walks in. Forward this email and let the love of our mothers go viral.”
“There’s the calling to midwifery. It’s been my entire life, because you cannot stand by and tolerate injustice. Not when you’ve found ways that do actually make a difference.” – Jenny Joseph
Thank God for Black women.
Thank God for Jenny Joseph.
In 2020, she became the first Black person in the U.S. to privately own a nationally accredited midwifery school, where she is increasing the ranks of Black midwives, training other health workers around the country in midwifery principles, and developing a national network of like-minded providers.
In 2022 she was one of 12 women named to the Time Magazine Woman of the Year list.
She is the Founder of Commonsense Childbirth and she and her community are rallying with GirlTREK this weekend as we honor Black mothers and Black motherhood by taking walks dedicated to the women whose footsteps we follow in.
Tomorrow, Chelsea Johnson, the CEO of Commonsense Childbirth, will be walking and talking with Morgan and Vanessa and women from around the world at 10AM ET/7AM PT on a special Mother’s Day edition of Sisterhood Saturday.
If you have not joined a Saturday walk, which you can do from wherever you are, just know this. The conversations and healing taking place each week have been spiritual and powerful. Don’t stay stuck where you are. Move with us and see what 30 minutes of radical self-care can do for your life.
We are grateful that Chelsea will be walking with us tomorrow, because Black mothers are dying in childbirth on our watch and we cannot sit back and let that happen.
Not when we have birthed this nation and nursed humanity from our bosom. Not when we have labored in fields and in C-suites and Ivory Towers building this country’s economy. Not when we have been the progenitors of culture, creating the trends that the rest of the world follows.
Our brilliance has given rise to inventions that have changed the way we live. Every day we mother children who did not come from our womb.
This Mother’s Day we celebrate Black motherhood in all of its forms.
Are you with us? Do you understand the assignment?
Who will you walk for this weekend?
Someone who held you down, and held you up. Someone who modeled what it means to walk by faith, not by sight. Someone who showed you how to be equal parts soft and strong. Someone who has been a waymaker, a healer, a teacher to you. Someone who has been the embodiment of God’s love for you.
mother /ˈməT͟Hər/
verb: a: to give rise to, produce b: to care for or protect like a mother
Ask every Black woman you know to take a walk this weekend in honor of a woman whose footsteps she walks in. Forward this email and let the love of our mothers go viral.
The GirlTREK Team
