Birthing Ourselves

At Birthing Ourselves, we exist for organisations and individuals engaged in meaningful social change. Our work centres the lived experience of multiply marginalised people in service of social transformation. We offer consultancy services for organisations, and we are slowly building up our community of multiply marginalised people engaged in social change. Our work seeks to honour the vastness of the challenges before us - by embracing, not ignoring the complicated personal, local, regional, national and global: - histories, relationships and systemic injustices - inter-personal/socio-political realities -individual and collective trauma that have created many of the 'wicked problems' that we are faced with. Our work tends to have 3 broad priorities: 1. Identifying, and 'presencing' the (sometimes invisible or unknown) macro level factors that impact and drive the issues that we are working with. 2. Recognising and challenging the ways that we, as individuals, have been taught to ignore, become de-sensitised to, internalise and perpetuate the issues that we are working with. 3. Creative co-creation from a shared place. Our work is rooted in the ethics of Women of Colour Feminism and Transformational Lived Experience - using what we have learned as multiply marginalised people as the starting point for positive social change. We do this by: 1. Embracing how our experiences of living between contradictory cultures has honed our critical abilities - we recognise inequality, we understand the world beyond 'binaries' and simple social categories. This enhances our creative capacity to re-imagine a more just and equitable society. 2. Honouring the transformational nature of our journeys - we have worked hard on challenging stigma, societal blind-spots and our own taken-for-granted assumptions, identifying how we are personally shaped by, and contribute to the unjust practices of the world in which we live.