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Twenty years of pioneering

non-clinical care.

Celebrating Birth Roots:

2004-2024

In 2024, Birth Roots celebrates a remarkable achievement: Twenty years of pioneering non-clinical perinatal care in southern Maine.

Founded in 2004, Birth Roots is Maine’s first non-clinical perinatal 501(c)(3) based in Portland directly serving more than 1,000 families annually. Birth Roots creates a culture of support for parents throughout the critical window of early child development – beginning in pregnancy – with robust programming that emphasizes new parents’ social, emotional, and non-clinical needs. Birth Roots believes that families and extended communities flourish by prioritizing parents’ deep need for belonging and perspective in early parenthood. Children and their parents emerge from the early development stages more resilient, confident, and connected.

Read our full-length Origin Story here.

Become a 20th Anniversary Sponsor:  Birth Roots is seeking business and foundation sponsors to champion our work throughout the 2024-25 program year: May 1st, 2024 thru April 30th, 2025. For more information, click the links below, or scroll down for a Flipbook of the Sponsorship packet.

Our Origin Story

In the early 2000s, Birth Roots Founders Leah Deragon and Emily Murray were colleagues and collaborators, working as independent birth doulas in southern Maine. As birth doulas – trained professionals who support a pregnant person through the enormous transition from pregnancy, through labor and delivery, and into early postpartum – Leah and Emily felt deeply connected to the families they supported. They knew that with each birth, they were helping parents have the best chance of establishing a positive foundation with their baby and family by guiding, witnessing, and offering extra hands to hold the mother before and after the baby arrived. 

However, Leah and Emily couldn’t help but notice a pattern of widespread isolation among the parents they served. New and expecting families were equipped with very little information and resources about their bodies, labor and delivery, and particularly the fourth trimester or postpartum period. And even in the early 2000s, as search engines like Google and Yahoo! were entering the fold, often the best a new mother could hope for was a copy of a glossy women’s magazine, a landline phone, and perhaps a chance encounter with a fellow parent at a playground. Prospects were grim and community-informed parenting was nowhere to be found.

Leah and Emily had a front-row seat to the silent crisis of what it means to be a modern parent in the U.S. They witnessed the short-term impacts and preempted the lasting effects of this crisis on families, communities, and the sustainable functioning of society. They knew that isolation and insufficient information were known risk factors for maternal mental health. The mental health crisis among mothers combined with uniquely nonexistent paid family leave (for either parent) spelled emotional disaster for so many. And still today, 25 percent of U.S. mothers return to work within just 10 days of giving birth. Fathers and partners in the early 2000s typically went right back to work within a day or two after their child was born. This system of bringing a child into the world was considered the norm (and had been for many decades). 

With equal parts instinct and their intimate understanding of what new mothers and parents need, Leah and Emily began to wonder if their experience working one-on-one with their clients could be transferable to groups. What if an organization’s sole purpose could be to help guide parents to foster belonging while also learning and preparing for their child’s birth, and then support and witness each other once the child arrives? 

The two professional doulas set out to respond to this urgent need. From 2003 to 2008, Emily and Leah’s early work to launch the Birth Roots of today was housed by a free-standing (non-hospital affiliated) birth center called The Ballard House in Portland, Maine. This very early iteration of Birth Roots provided childbirth education and postnatal support groups to families choosing a Birth Center option, as well as for families from the greater community looking for something more than what a typical hospital birth class offered. 

The “Aha Moment” for Leah and Emily happened almost by accident. Their early postnatal support groups at the Ballard House typically invited a guest speaker or “expert” to talk to the group of new or expecting mothers. By mere observation, Leah and Emily took note of what happened once the guest speaker wrapped up and left: the moms stayed to chat. The unstructured, casual nature of their conversations could be as simple as asking about a better stroller option or carrier to listening to a new mother’s harrowing labor and delivery story. Leah and Emily collected participant feedback and consistently received reviews from parents that the “expert guest speakers were getting in the way of what the parents wanted.” Out of these ordinary and yet profound moments of shared experience and bonding, the Facilitating Community curriculum was born. 

From that moment on, Birth Roots built the foundation of Creating the Context for trauma-healing, identity-shifting, community-deepening, nervous system co-regulating, narrative-updating, voice-finding, and perspective-validating. All of this from the absence of an “expert” in the room. All of this from the organic, authentic tenderness of new parents sharing their lived experience.

When Birth Roots moved out of The Ballard House in 2008, the organization began to appeal to a much broader audience. The Birth Roots Perinatal Resource Guide – a free, hard copy booklet distributed throughout southern Maine connected like-minded businesses and created a web of support beyond the Birth Roots groups. The Guide is still published annually with a distribution of about 3,000 (and growing) copies every single year! 

Today, Birth Roots is a 501c3 providing community-based education and support focused on pregnancy through the early years of parenting with classes and events that emphasize connection, instinct, intuition, and a cultural context that addresses the social, emotional, and non-clinical needs of new parents. 

Birth Roots is dedicated to representing Maine’s diverse communities and needs, knowing that there is not one type of family, situation, or experience. Birth Roots strives to be an organization that is comfortable with change, evolution, and feedback – as the community changes and grows, Birth Roots readily adapts. No parent, no matter their needs, or background, should ever feel isolated in their journey to build and grow a family. 

For more than 20 years, Birth Roots has responded to the ever-changing needs of families. Today, Birth Roots stays focused on the lived experiences of their participants with a facilitation style known as their Facilitating Community and the Community Supported Parenting Approach.

Birth Roots is known by every Birthing Center, gynecology office, midwife, doula, mental health professional, young family and more in southern Maine, and their goal is to be valued statewide to effect change not only at the local level but continue to have influence culturally. 

The organization is located in the Woodfords Corner neighborhood of Portland, tucked next to a burst of pines and (everyone’s favorite) Coveside Coffee Shop. Birth Roots features a sizable fenced-in yard that inspired Baby Roots Nature Camp in May of 2019 as part of their Outdoor Classroom. This allowed Birth Roots to expand its scope of programming from the nine months before and nine months after birth to now include the transition from baby to toddler (or through 36 months). 

In addition to the organization’s signature Facilitating Community-style pre-and post-natal classes that cultivate enduring peer social support networks we call Flocks, the Resource Guide, and the toddler Nature Camp, Birth Roots extends its programming into our Social Media spheres to reach thousands of parents and community members every day. 

The work of Birth Roots has made new parenthood less invisible and less silent during a time when the contrast between perinatal care and family leave policies in the U.S. and other developed nations is becoming more defined and stark. 

The original co-founders, Emily and Leah, are still active and now have the support of their first Executive Director, Kate McCarthy, hired in 2021. With the incredible support of Kate, along with two additional staff members, Birth Roots has strengthened the programmatic and administrative infrastructure that allows them the breathing room, the stamina, and the prospect to continue to dream big and ask the enduring question…“What’s next?”

For more information about supporting the work of Birth Roots, please review our 20th Anniversary Sponsorship packet below.