Celebrating Our Inaugural Birth Justice Film Festival
A segment of our work at St. Joseph Fund (SJF) is to build power alongside grassroots organizations doing the hardest, most healing work in our communities. These efforts were celebrated at our inaugural Black and Indigenous Birth Justice Collaborative Film Festival earlier this year.
At the start of the initiative’s phase, the co-leads came to us with a vision not only to assess the impact of each Collaborative participant but also to honor their work. They didn’t want another written report to capture their impact. They wanted story, community, and creativity to speak for themselves.
So that’s what we designed together.
A Night of Story, Not Statistics
The Film Festival brought together community partners and funders for a screening of short documentary films, each one capturing the heart of a partner organization’s work. Terrence Jeffrey Santos of Filipinotown Magazine filmed and hosted the evening, giving every partner the chance to introduce themselves in their own words and on their own terms.
Some shared the humble, scrappy origins of their organizations. Others invited their children up to the stage to sing. Every group brought something of themselves to their film before it premiered. What each shared was truly a piece of who they are.
That’s the kind of evaluation we believe in. Not metrics divorced from meaning, but stories that hold the full truth of the work: the grief, the joy, the persistence, the love.
The evening wasn’t only about what happened on screen. Before the films rolled, partners and funders shared an intentionally curated meal. The food reflected the cultures and communities in the room, offering another way for people to feel seen, welcomed, and at home.
Stewardship Beyond Dollars
For SJF, this event exemplified our commitment to healing-centered capacity building. We handled the logistics so our partners could show up and be celebrated. Power building alongside our partners is more than funding. It’s showing up for them the way they show up for their communities, every day.
Meet the Collaborative
The Collaborative brings together birthing partners across Washington state through peer-to-peer learning, solidarity, and healing. Together, they’re advancing equity, racial healing, and justice for Black and Indigenous birthing people and birth workers — from doula care and home visiting to language revitalization, childcare, policy change, and so much more.
Meet the partners whose films premiered at the Film Fest:
- Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services — culturally matched doula care, home visiting, and guaranteed income for Native American, Alaska Native, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian families.
- Həłmxiłp Birth Justice Center — Indigenous-led doula care, language revitalization, and coming-of-age programming rooted in Spokane’s Native community.
- Hilltop Urban Gardens – a social justice and food sovereignty organization rooted in shared power, growing healthy food, healthy neighbors, and racial and economic justice while protecting Black LGBTQ, Black trans, and houseless community members.
- LifeWerQ — birth work training by and for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, including queer and trans communities.
- Native Family Learning Lodge — a Black, Indigenous, and matriarch-led birth-to-five childcare space growing from one founder’s home into a community kinship model of education, language and culture revitalization, and food sovereignty led by parent educators and elders.
- Shades of Motherhood Network — a Spokane-based network funding and sustaining Black doulas, alongside maternal art exhibits and peer support for Black mothers.
- Surge Reproductive Justice — community-directed policy work centering Black feminism, winning the nation’s highest Medicaid reimbursement rate for doulas.
Watch Their Films
We invite you to learn more about the Initiative and to meet the Collaborative for yourself. Watch the films, hear directly from the people doing this work, and see what’s possible when community, not a written report, gets to tell the story.
