Explore Our Programs
Check out the programs and initiatives that we have in progress this year! We are welcoming collaborators, sponsors, vendors, partners, and attendees! You can reach us by contact form or by email: therebirthsociety@gmail.com.
Free Doula Care Program
This past year we expanded our free full-spectrum support programs to help ensure that birthing people and families with financial barriers have access to doula care and birth support. These programs also provide paid employment opportunities for doulas, and provide experiential learning opportunities for doulas-in-training. Our free programs are offered virtually and in-person. They include:
Postpartum Care Visits
Labor Prep Sessions
Birth Planning Session
(Re)Birth Academy & For Youth Immersions (FYI)
(Re)Birth Academy is our intergenerational, multicurricular learning program. Our network supports and connects families, educators, learning cooperatives, and community education programs both online and in-person, primarily offering workshops, classes and resources. In the past year our education efforts have been focused on implementing our summer learning program .
Our Life Cycles Youth Gardening program takes a practical, interactive approach to teaching youth about land and community stewardship. Learners work hands-on with soil-based and hydroponic gardens, and natural environments as they learn beginner concepts of gardening, botany, herbology, and ecology relevant to plant, animal and human reproduction and regeneration. This program is meant to engage learners with different life forms and offer them a gentle segue into understanding procreation and cultivation of different life forms.
In each 4-week cohort, learners engage with plant parts, processes and ecosystems, using our community garden for field study, while learning the medicinal, cultural and culinary uses of plants we grow and forage.
(Re)Birth Society's For You(th) Immersion program offers young people the opportunity to participate in culturally enriching experiences, meant to educate and inspire them, and to connect them more deeply to humanity and the world around them. The FYI program will host free group trips, workshops and outings related to the music, theatre, nature, trades, and more!
We hope to partner with educators of various fields of study to provide more essential trainings, teachings and tools that will help uplift our community! If you are an educator looking to offer classes, trainings, or discussions, please email us at therebirthsociety@gmail.com!
Mutual Aid Initiatives
From 2023 to 2026, we aim to provide mutual aid relief to pregnant, disabled, elderly, incarcerated, and financially-challenged people in our community. We have two categories for our mutual aid efforts: Monetary & Service-Based. Monetary mutual aid requires us to crowdfund and allocate a portion of our grant funding. Service-based mutual aid requires us to organize volunteers to perform services for people in need. Services include but aren’t limited to grocery pick ups, ride shares, and childcare assistance.
Over the past year we offered stipends to parents facing SNAP cuts during the federal shutdown, we prepared 100 care packages to distribute to families and individuals from Fall to Summer, we delivered groceries, diapers, and toiletries to families and to unhoused people on the South Side. We will continue to address and organize around the needs of our community members.
Art, Archives & Media
We aim to improve the quality & accuracy of modern depictions of African-Indigenous experiences of the past, present, and future. We intend to share the lived and imagined experiences of our community in a way that educates and empowers us.
We are currently working on a few archival projects. We've begun filming and recording interviews with elders and community members, holding their stories to be compiled into various pieces. We are also holding a community archive of narratives collected during our Hoodoo Heritage Festivals over the past three years. These records will be passed on to future generations in their search of Hoodoo.
We are working on a presentation called Sounds & Stories, which takes audiences through the sounds and stories of Black Americans from the precolonial era to the present. We hope to be able to present this production at Hoodoo Heritage Festival 2026.
In 2024 and 2025, we partnered with Brain Studios and JBambii to support the filming of the music video for JBambii's single, "Church Fan" from her sophomore project, Black American Beauty. As multi-year sponsors and supporters, we are planning further collaborations for 2026.
We advocate for the right to locally, organically, and sustainably grown food and aim to make it accessible to African-Indigenous communities. We also know that agriculture is central to any self-sustained community. We are funded by the National Black Food & Justice Alliance in support of our Land & Community Stewardship Program.
We are stewarding and installing urban community gardening systems with which we (1) grow & distribute food, (2) educate the people, (3) collect data to duplicate & expand project across the South Side of Chicago.
Currently we steward garden plots at Brickyard Community Garden and Kumunda Community Garden in the Woodlawn community of South Side Chicago. If you'd like to collaborate with us, fill out this form! Peep our event page for gardening and farmers market link ups!
Land & Community Stewardship Initiative
Community Events & Wellness Spaces
We curate wellness events and spaces where our community members could gather and take part in affordable holistic healing services, workshops, ceremonies and experiences. Our goal has been to support the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health of people in our community. A few of our key wellness spaces include:
For You(th) Immersions: Teen Theatre Trip - February 2026
Seed Starting Garden Link Up - April 2026
Muva's Day Free Store Pop Up- May 2026
Garden Gals Link Ups - Spring/Summer 2026
Hoodoo Heritage Festival - October 2026
Community Care Clinic - October 2026
A few of our past events include:
Garden Greens Giveaway Pop Up - Spring 2025
A Little Juju Book Release Celebration - October 2024
“Hey Mama” Support Circle - May 2023; November 2023
Lake Katherine Kayaking Link Up - October 2023
Little River Canyon Hike - June 2023
NGVP Ubuntu Collective Retreat - February 2024
International Women’s Day Dinner - March 2024
We host in-person ongoing family-friendly events, or "Link-Ups.” During these gatherings, families and community members are invited to join us in exploring, learning and playing. We have visited museums, hosted hikes, met at parks, dined at cultural restaurants, curated creative spaces and partnered with other organizations to offer our youth a rich environment of creative expression, fun, and scholarship.
Throughout the summer and fall we will be inviting families and people of all ages to “Link Up” with us and each other at different locations around the city, that are easy to access, affordable, and that we would consider “light-weight” in terms of planning and expense. We know that play, exploration, connection and being in nature can improve our quality of life, and we want to help normalize these activities within the BIPOC & ALANA communities.