Community-Owned Doula Care Platform, 2022

HealthConnect One (HCOne) is the national leader in advancing equitable community-based, peer-to-peer support for pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and early parenting. HCOne has a history of collaborating with communities to support under-resourced Black, Brown and Indigenous communities and birthing families to achieve positive health outcomes and has a vision to see every baby, mother, and family thrive in a healthy community through an equity focused approach supporting the first 1000 days for birthing families.

Widespread Care builds community-owned technology and helps autonomous organizations form, run democratically, and collaborate with one another. The work is informed by a decade of working with community health workers, practices of relational organizing, and histories of collective action in the face of oppression. Widespread Care’s founder formerly co-founded and served as CEO of Medic, a nonprofit technology company supporting 40,000 community health workers globally.

HealthConnect One and Widespread Care will be collaborating with doulas to envision community-owned technologies that support doulas and families in communities of care. During this New Jersey-centered project, partners will gain an understanding of the doula workflow, analyze strengths and gaps of current tools, run community-based design thinking and prototyping sessions, and co-design solutions with doulas. Initial work will inform future phases of building and iterating on tools that are imagined, championed, and owned by doulas.