Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Getting It Done

Wow!!  Inspired today by so much awesomeness.  Women rule.

I'm starting to see myself as an instrument of change.  The good news is that I don't have to play the whole band at once!  Activist birth work is becoming more reachable in my mind- the training I'm at now is empowering me with lots of tools to use to keep me focused, connected, and effective.

The training is through an extension of HHS's (Health and Human Services) Office of Women's Health called the Women's Health Leadership Institute (hell yea), and I got here because I'm a doula.  It's part of an initiative to introduce more Community Health Workers (CHWs) to the health field.  We get to directly interface with the community around us and have an impact on health disparities based on gender, socioeconomic status, and race.  The training group is about one third cornfed Midwestern ladies like myself, one third African American (a couple of ladies in maternal health in Omaha), and the rest are Latina.  There's a young mama who's an educator at Planned Parenthood, lots of women older than my mother, and the trainers are both cute and funny.  At the end of Thursday, I'm not going to want it to end.  We're all bringing so much to the table and learning so much at the same time.  I already have ideas churning on what my project will be (we all have to carry out and document some community health project once we're finished with the training).  What a blessing it's been so far (even if the internet at the hotel ain't free).

This kind of sisterhood can't happen enough.  This is how this shit's gonna get done.

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