Jeanine Valrie Logan, Founder + Lead Steward, Chicago South Side Birth Center
Shruti Jayaraman, Chief Investments Officer, Chicago Beyond
According to a 2024 report published by the Commonwealth Fund, the United States has a higher maternal mortality rate than any other high-income country. This is driven in part by the maternal health disparities experienced by Black women, who are three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Efforts are underway across the country to address this crisis, including in Illinois, where earlier in 2024, the state’s governor included a $23 million commitment to birth equity efforts in his 2025 fiscal year budget.
Grantmakers In Health (GIH) recently spoke with Jeanine Valrie Logan, Founder + Lead Steward of the Chicago South Side Birth Center, and Shruti Jayaraman, Chief Investments Officer of Chicago Beyond, to learn how the Chicago South Side Birth Center and Chicago Beyond are working together to improve maternal health outcomes for mothers in one of Chicago’s most underserved communities. This interview has been edited for style and clarity.
Please tell us about the Chicago South Side Birth Center and the unique needs it serves.
Jeanine Valrie Logan: Once open, the Chicago South Side Birth Center will be a Black midwife-led, freestanding, independent birth center. Our aim is to provide concordant, culturally reverent, community-centered care.
“Birth center” is an intentional term. It is a place where people can come and receive prenatal care, receive intrapartum care, or give birth—where people can have their baby and receive postpartum care. We wanted to keep the birth center name intentionally, because we want to help community understand what access to health care they can receive in the birth center.
We speak about our birth center vision, but we also have intentions of having a robust, full-spectrum reproductive health clinic. The services we provide will be whole person care, family planning, gender-affirming care, abortion care, folks can get STD testing there, and then some primary care. Along with mental health services, we are inviting community partners to come and provide services that are complementary, like acupuncture and massage.
The reason why I said those words are intentional is because we want the community to understand that this will be a full-spectrum reproductive health care center right in their neighborhood, but also that we’re focused on community and focused on having providers that represent the communities that are served. So, we’re talking about Black, Indigenous, BIPOC providers, queer providers, providers that are from the South Side. All of that is really important to us and the need that we will be fulfilling.
We want the community to be in the center of everything we do—we’re building an advisory board that will be full of community members. We’ve also [used] community surveys to inform the kinds of services and opportunities we want to provide at the birth center.
We’re in the middle of our capital campaign, and our fundraising consultant asked me to make the case of why the birth center is so important, if there are other birth centers in other parts of the city. For example, could someone in North Lawndale just go to the birth center closest to them? My response was yes, they could—you can get a cheeseburger in any neighborhood, but is it your favorite? When you walk in, do you want to take your shoes off and get a cup of tea? Are you being greeted by an elder that is there only to give unsolicited advice? Are your children welcome to come in? People can go anywhere for care, but the model that we’re trying to create is a place where we’re a pillar in the community. And like I said, it’s intentionally intergenerational. We have partners that are going to provide food and fresh produce to our clients, so we’re incorporating the love and the work and the skills of all of our community partners to have a centralized place where people can get access to all these different resources.
I also try not to talk about the birth center as a response to racialized obstetric trauma or a response to systems, because we deserve to have this liberatory space. But in the interim, some of our goals are to improve the maternal health and infant health outcomes in the neighborhood. So we’re talking about communities where the poor maternal and infant health outcomes are double and triple poor outcomes in the county, in the city, and in the state. We will definitely be providing new care services and essential reproductive health care services. A double-digit infant mortality rate and mitigating maternal mortality is one of the needs that we hope to fulfill, and then we envision a collective community space for healing and enjoying liberation.
What are the specific maternal health and birth equity challenges faced by communities in Chicago?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: This is my vantage point as a midwife and a provider—and as someone who has navigated maternal health care in and out of the city. Some of the things that I see and talk to clients and peers about is access to midwifery care. This is a national problem, so it’s not specific to just Chicago. That’s really important, because midwives play a very instrumental role in mitigating poor outcomes for folks who are growing families. And what we’ve seen since the beginning of time—this is a whole other interview—is the eradication of Southern Black and Indigenous midwives.
But as the midwifery field has grown, it’s become predominantly white. There’s less than 7 percent of midwives of color in the nation. And so, when we think about poor outcomes in different communities and concordant care, where there’s providers taking care of clients that look like them [and] are from the same community, you don’t have that. And so particularly in Chicago—particularly on the South Side—there’s just not a robust access to midwifery care. There’s two hospital practices that have midwife care on the South Side, so then that goes into: What does access really look like?
People [believe] that you can just go to any hospital to have a baby, but in Chicago communities, a lot of our community or catchment hospitals are being closed or merged or losing those practices in terms of obstetric services. We have more than a couple of hospitals on the South Side that have no obstetrics services—I recently read that the South Side houses 25 percent of the people in Chicago. So, you have these large geographical [areas] that have very limited access to obstetric care—and there are no birth centers on the South Side of Chicago.
You have people leaving communities and going into settings [where there is not] understanding of what’s accessible in terms of food or transportation or safety. One thing that I’m always talking to colleagues about [is] how can we talk about exercise and pregnancy if it’s not safe to walk outside or you have no green spaces in your community?
How would you describe Chicago Beyond’s approach as a funder and what are some specific birth equity projects you’re working on?
Shruti Jayaraman: Jeanine’s answers help me to understand how I can contribute in this conversation, taking a bit of a wide lens, from a funder perspective.
For context, Chicago Beyond is a funder with roots in Chicago and national scope. We were founded by renowned educator Liz Dozier with funding support from Kimbra and Mark Walter. Chicago Beyond invests in people and organizations closest to the issues, like the Chicago South Side Birth Center and Jeanine. We also lead initiatives nationally in collaboration with others, and we share insights as we learn. We were founded in 2016, and we have invested upwards of $65 million since that time.
Chicago Beyond is holistic. In birth and maternal health, as in other spaces we invest in, our approach begins with seeking to understand the ecosystem—taking the wide lens—in contrast to a narrow view, which can end up missing effective solutions. This means examining what perspectives regularly get overlooked? What perspectives can cross silos? That has led us to funding work that is shaped and led by firsthand experience. This is work that is often overlooked by institutional funding and is zeroed in on deep change. Importantly, it challenges us to question: Who do we see as “leaderful” in this work?
The second place the approach leads us is to then fund these leaders and organizations substantially and over time. And third, it leads to real discipline around noticing, around listening, and around learning. For an approach to be effective, especially when it comes to the significant challenges we face, it has to be able to listen and respond and course correct and be open to disconfirming evidence.
What we found from taking this approach is that it unlocks new, innovative, just, enduring, and effective work that matters for people. And when I say “new,” many of these things—as Jeanine was mentioning—are really old. So maybe what I should instead say is “uncommon,” from the perspective of what is getting funded. We see funded partners deploying Chicago Beyond funds to open access to care, as Jeanine was mentioning, to bring community together in dynamic ways, to effectively reach where other solutions are not able to reach, and to collaborate with government in ways that break down silos and inspire.
You asked about some specific Chicago Beyond work relating to birth. Let’s start with the Chicago Beyond Leader in Residence model—Jeanine is currently our Leader in Residence. This is not a model specific to birth, but essentially it is about supporting leaders to realize a vision bigger than themselves that they already hold. It is the approach I just described in action: examining who we recognize as leaders, how substantially supporting those leaders works, and how we are learning.
In Chicago Beyond’s Leader in Residence model, the first point is, who is it for? It is for leaders with deep legitimacy in their communities who are employing their firsthand experience to serve others. Often these are leaders who do not seek out the limelight.
The second point is time—this kind of work takes time. The Leader in Residence model is three or more years long. It is space to think, dream, formulate, act. It protects the leader’s time from unnecessary hoops to jump through. It includes time to rest, time in the form of Paid Time Off.
The third point is substantial funding. Deploying dollars for salary and benefits to a rising leader can be transformative in terms of the impact. This is an opportunity for grantmakers, because it is accessible to a lot of different types of funders. But it means you have to get beyond programs and products that are tidy and familiar, to fund people. The Leader in Residence model includes a salary and benefits and in this particular partnership with Jeanine, there is also investment in the physical structure of the Chicago South Side Birth Center with an anchor capital commitment.
Then the fourth point is supports, which is both about what is actually supportive according to the particular piece of work, and also according to the funder’s capacity to do well. In this case, with Jeanine as Leader in Residence, this means architects, lawyers, connections, physical meeting and working space, and human support—for example, serving as a resource when a wave of communication attention and demand hits.
At the end of the day, these are all of our babies. With the Leader in Residence model, it has been about how, from the funder seat, we could make work that is necessary and impactful a little bit more spacious, a little less bureaucratic, a little faster, to let the latent power and joy in this work unfold.
Chicago Beyond also substantially supports organizations, such as Birth Center Equity (BCE), led by Leseliey Welch, who is another leader your readers should know. BCE is working to increase the number of birth centers led by people from and of their communities of color nationally, just within next year, by more than 50 percent.
With all of our partners, Chicago Beyond supports their work, but they are also supporting our evolution as a funder. We are soon to announce the inaugural class of the Fellowship for Black Maternal Health. A bit like the MacArthur Genius grants—it is substantial, no-strings funding to leaders across the United States. There has been some momentum in this space, so it is a time when leadership from within communities being able to operate from some financial freedom matters all the more.
How do you measure the impact of this work?
Shruti Jayaraman: Impact is, I believe, a big part of why we all came to this work in the first place. What Jeanine and I have described is an impactful way to work, and, honestly, a joyful way to work.
Sometimes “joyful” gets attached to “not rigorous,” and so I want to be careful that readers are not making that leap. I will own that I am a math geek and have been my whole life. I love numbers—our whole family loves numbers. We have two daughters who love math. To be serious about impact, the first thing we have to be serious about is how evidence is produced. At Chicago Beyond we have a guidebook—Why Am I Always Being Researched?—that shares some of our learnings about the relationship between evidence—evidence of all kinds—impact, bias, and community work. This is a practice with a deep seriousness about impact and the lives of real people.
Chicago Beyond’s funded partners working on birth have measures that they rigorously pay attention to—preterm births, birth weight, C-sections, the experience of the person giving birth, and at the end of the day, do people live, are the babies well? Beyond this, Chicago Beyond is also attentive to the ripple effects over time, because this is about deep work.
In addition to the health outcomes of the model of care of the Chicago South Side Birth Center, like infant and maternal mortality rates that Jeanine mentioned earlier, Jeanine Logan has directly contributed to multiple pieces of significant legislation for Illinois and has done that over the course of years—and has helped steward coalitions. She is probably going to smack me because she’s humble, but her leadership has touched everything from practice rules to access points for care to Medicaid reimbursement.
Lastly, and as important, when we speak of impact from the funder seat, is whether Chicago Beyond as a funder is doing what are we accountable to do. Not just “did we go out and listen?”, but what did we actually change in our practice in response?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: Can I add one more thing about impact? I was working full time as a midwife in the hospital overnights, and so I had three 24-hour calls a week, and then three clinic days, and then seeing clients, charting at night, writing legislation for birth center expansion in Illinois, calling congress people to vote for that legislation, trying to build a website, and trying to raise money. And, you know, I have three children and a partner. So just having the opportunity to say, you have a vision, and we’re going to not only fund you in actualizing this vision, but provide support in all the ways Shruti mentioned. That is impact.
I didn’t know anything about philanthropy when I joined Chicago Beyond—and a lot of things that I was hearing in terms of philanthropy was be more risky, take a risk, invest in innovative strategies. But I don’t think creating a birth center is actually taking a risk. Investing in ways that communities can provide care to themselves in ways that are beautiful and culturally relevant. And you know, without that impact that I am experiencing, I wouldn’t have been able to make as much movement in the government and policy space, or present at national conventions, or write, or rest, or dream, or envision what the birth center is going to look like in five or 10 years. I wouldn’t have five staff. I think a lot of those things would have gotten there eventually, but not in the same momentum of, these last three years that I’ve been with Chicago Beyond. And I’ll add that therapy, health insurance, and all of these other things are very impactful to my longevity in this work.
Jeanine, could you speak a bit about how you first became connected with Chicago Beyond—how did you start working together and how has your partnership evolved?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: One of Chicago Beyond’s streams of work is providing Rapid Response funding to community organizations. When they give Rapid Response funding, they also ask grantees, “Who else in the community should we know about?” One of the grantees is an amazing organization called Ujimaa Medics, I’m actually on the board of that organization. When they asked Ujimaa Medics’ Executive Director, Martine Caverl, who else they should know, Martine mentioned me. Shruti called me to find out a little bit more about our work. And I remember her words were: “I think we may be in a position to do something more here—I’m going to call you back.” No one ever, up until then, had sat down to really understand the vision, and the need, and the why, and about what is drawing me to do this. We had a series of conversations—hour-long conversations—to really understand more about the birth center. And then I was offered the opportunity to be a Leader in Residence. And that’s my side of the story—there’s always two sides, maybe three sides, to a story! So that’s how I was brought in.
Shruti Jayaraman: I can so clearly remember, I was standing by a willow tree when I spoke with Jeanine. It was that experience when you happen upon somebody whose purpose and beacon-leadership is evident. You feel this sense of gratitude, putting aside role and [thinking], “I am so grateful this human is. I am grateful this leadership is. This is a leader the world needs, and what a gift that I get to be in this conversation.”
Jeanine Valrie Logan: I think I came in flailing—I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know how I was going to get things done. You know, it’s just a dream, right? If you tell someone, “Come work with us for X amount of years, and we’ll offer you this opportunity,” it’s pretty unbelievable.
Chicago Beyond has consistently been intentional about standing in, I would say, faith. They have not only invested in me, they believed in a dream of mine and a vision of mine, where at that moment, no one thought I could pull it off. I fell in love with Chicago Beyond at the first moment, my first day was January 31—my birthday was the next day. Now, this is the best birthday gift I’ve had in a long time—so amazing and just literally a dream come true. I can honestly feel the buy-in and the investment and the actual care from the Chicago Beyond team about seeing this project succeed.
How can funders better support grassroots organizations and community-led initiatives like Chicago South Side Birth Center, and what responsibility do funders have in addressing systemic barriers in communities, not just in Chicago, but around the United States?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: I would really appreciate it if funders supported more policy work. I was at a funding convening where all the grantees were at an all-day meeting with the funder to learn more about the funder and our potential work together. I remember talking to one of the doctors there that spoke during the day There was a moment on stage where the doctor was like, “We really need to support doulas—we really need to support doula expansion and the work of doulas.” And I came up to her afterwards, and I was like, “I love what you’re saying. But have you considered being a voice for expanding pay parity and expanding—I hate the word the “workforce”—but having more midwives being accessible?” She wasn’t very receptive to what I was saying and I thought, wow, it’s just so interesting how if there’s a catchy buzzword, or if there’s a trend, or if there’s something that’s been funded over centuries, people feel more comfortable investing in that. But I say we have to invest in new strategies, because investing in the same things that we’ve invested in before is not going to get us a different outcome.
And so, we need investment in policy work, because there are birth workers all over the nation asking for rights to practice in their full scope of practice, rights to be paid, pay parity, rights to create innovative ways to care for their community, which they’re already going to do, and they’ve already been doing. Smaller and less familiar organizations that have and will continue doing the work get overlooked when it comes to funding. For many of these RFPs you have to have a certain [number] of budgets and audited documents. All these things are necessary, but without funding, opportunities and connections to accountants and lawyers and people who can help you, you’re not going to ever be a good fit for funding to many of these funders. Chicago Beyond is an example of how to mitigate that and find ways to support people to do the work that they have been doing accountably, but in a more efficient, faster and maybe less stressful way.
Shruti Jayaraman: From my perspective, Thing One in doing better by grassroots efforts and community leaders is listening to grassroots efforts and community leaders. So, I think we began this response in the right place.
It’s funny, because when you said the phrase “systemic barriers,” funding itself is one of the systemic barriers. The scenario is not, “there’s a systemic barrier over there that we funders need to go fix.” This is good news. Because it means what needs changing is within our capacity as funders to change, which is empowering.
I’d love to uplift a few examples of funders addressing barriers, because it is not a theoretical thing. This is imminently, practically, possible. There are funders who have learned about the birth ecosystem from experts on the ground and have taken action to support grassroots work over many years. There is thoughtful work in the field to get past philanthropy’s “who knows who” dynamic that has been limiting. For example, the work of the Lever for Change platform. Pivotal Ventures recently announced a $250 million open call on women’s mental and physical health through this platform, to fund beyond those they already know. Supporting grassroots and community-led work also includes supporting the infrastructure for it and the spaces that nourish it, according to the people doing the work. For example, just a few weeks ago, I was with Vital Village, which offers that type of infrastructure for the Boston ecosystem.
Jeanine Valrie Logan: I love that you said that, because you’re reminding me that I think it might have been a panel that you were on about funding—more funding for longer, like multiple years, really trying to develop a relationship with funders and funding partners. I remember there was a grant that I was going to apply for, but it was going to take me, like 10 hours to do it, and it was like $10,000 so I didn’t do it because it was very complicated. There were a lot of questions in my brain that almost fell out of my head trying to think about how to answer these questions. I noticed this more as we’re getting more funding—the application is very basic, and then we have a conversation, and it’s really about understanding each other, building a relationship. That’s actually how we’ve gotten most of our recent funding is through having conversations or inviting someone to our building, which I feel is less transactional and feels better in terms of who we accept funding from as well.
How does Chicago Beyond engage in equitable decision making and work so that grantees have agency?
Shruti Jayaraman: This is an important conversation that could be an interview all by itself. I can share a couple of bits here. In Chicago Beyond’s initial years, something like 4 percent of multiyear funding commitments went to work led by people with direct experience. That number is 100 percent today. It has required redesigning the process in more fundamental ways than simply having community voice committees somewhere along the way. And that’s why I say from firsthand experience this is imminently possible and doable, in many different kinds of funding structures.
[Here are] two examples, and there’s an SSIR piece with more. If funders—being evidence-based—have the data that show that as a funding community we are missing parts of the picture regularly and repeatedly, then what is it that we are changing to get somewhere different? At the front end, Chicago Beyond is essentially designing a pathway to substantial, flexible funding for smaller organizations or organizations with little or no previous institutional funding, or organizations led by firsthand experience or any number of self-identifications that the data show regularly get overlooked for funding. And so, because we are here to try to make significant funding accessible to people and organizations who may not have grant writing staff—who may not have a lot of experience playing the institutional funding game—our staff write the board proposals for multiyear funding.
A second tactical example is a tool called Chicago Beyond’s Mirror Tool that has helped us and other funders. It is a reflection guide to make more conscious choices towards what it is we actually intend to do, and ultimately leads to more effective individual and collective decision-making, depending on the structure you’re in, and higher quality decisions. I just ran into a grantmaker in California who’d used it for effective dialogue between different vantage points, and ultimately decisions better lined up to their intentions, in their mental health grantmaking.
So how do you both envision the future of your partnership? Are there specific initiatives, advocacy efforts, or plans that you’re excited about?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: I’m super excited, personally, for the Fellowship for Black Maternal Health that Shruti spoke about earlier—and I’m excited to open the South Side Birth Center and see it through. Chicago Beyond is going to be there with their construction caps on [at the] groundbreaking. And then, more advocacy around birth equity that we’re doing nationally—that’s a really big thing for us.
Shruti Jayaraman: The opening of the Chicago South Side Birth Center, the state-level work, whether it’s funding streams or scope of practice, issues multiple of our partners inform, and the Fellowship for Black Maternal Health. Please stay tuned for an announcement coming soon of the inaugural class of fellows.
When is the Chicago South Side Birth Center scheduled to open?
Jeanine Valrie Logan: Right now the timeline is spring 2026. It’s about a 10-month build out, and we’re on track to start renovations around March or April of next year.
Shruti Jayaraman: [The Chicago South Side Birth Center] has been hosting a Latch and Stroll event for three years now, and each year to see the way that space fills up and it has built connection across people doing this work from different vantage points—this is a living body of work, already.