..so let's say we get out there and do more in 2014

There's still time to donate

We're getting close to our target goal to help keep on the lights here in 2014 at The Big Push for Midwives with the New Year here upon us. On Friday, Jan. 24, 2014, we will celebrate our 6th PushDay and another trip around the sun aimed at expanding access to Certified Professional Midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care. But CPMs and the families who choose them still need your help! Let's make this year's goal. If you've been meaning to make a contribution, now's the time.

What Have You Done for Me Lately:
The Big Push 2013 Roundup

To help push harder in 2014, the Big Push for Midwives Campaign doubled down just lately to gather resources, provide strategic planning and message development, outreach proactively with news media, and create new tools and helpful services for state consumer and midwife groups that are actively working on legislation to license CPMs, envisioning the day when CPMs are licensed in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam.

2013 saw the Big Push lose and regain its PushMediaMachine powered by Vocus and the Big Push Steering Committee. From the early days on the campaign in 2007 and 2008 to the headlines we see in the media today, there is so much to be grateful for across the good PushNation of tens of thousands of people. If you are left wanting for more:

• Review the latest PushHeadlines.
• See all the news that's fit to push in the Newsroom.
• Get inspired by just how much your donation means.

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign is not a top-down organization, rather, the essence of grassroots. The Big Push has always been the work of a coalition of the PushStates groups, and the collective focus has always been to create a mutual-help project for all the consumers and midwives pushing in the statehouses and sharing ideas, strategies, successes, and setbacks to create efficiencies and interconnectivity.

Thank you!

We really can't say it enough - so we'll say it again here. Thank you. We have the best group of members and supporters that we could ask for, and it's because of you that we have been able to keep going.

How far do we have to go?

We're just 50 monthly donors (at $10/mo) away from hitting our goal and ringing the bell on making our 2014 target goal - but why stop there? Let's see if we can beat our record. In addition to donations, we could use your help spreading the word to your friends and family (and clients if you are a professional) to expand the circle of the birth activist community.

In commemoration of Labor Day 2013, The Big Push for Midwives Campaign has launched the Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day fundraising project, which will give thousands of families across the United States the opportunity to honor their midwife and support our media campaign to raise public awareness about the benefits of midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care.

Your tax-deductible donations will go directly to reserving a space on the Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day wall on The Big Push for Midwives Campaign website, where you can express your appreciation and gratitude for your midwife.

In addition to honoring the midwives working to preserve birth options for families seeking an alternative to hospital birth, Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day will fund the technological and professional resources needed to support The Big Push for Midwives Public Relations and Social Media team. We are the only national organization providing professionally developed, proactive and pro-midwife Public Relations and Media Relations services, including customized media lists, to states with active grassroots campaigns in support of expanding access to midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care.

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign's professional communications team has a proven track record of honoring the midwifery profession by placing positive stories about the many benefits associated with midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care in local, state, national, and international media outlets.

The sad truth is that midwives rarely get the honor they deserve for providing families with the full range of birth options, improving birth outcomes, and saving millions of dollars in health care costs each year. The Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day gives people the opportunity to both honor their midwife at the personal level and support the campaign to honor the profession of midwifery itself at a much broader level, through the media, and slowly change the many negative cultural attitudes about birth.

Please donate and help spread the word to raise public awareness of the personal, social, and economic benefits associated with midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care and fight back against anti-midwife, anti-home birth propaganda that continues to find its way into the media.

Fire up the PushMediaMachine, we are back in business! We live to Push again! Many thanks and lots of hugs and kisses to all of you incredibly wonderful Pushers and other folks who chipped in on this latest fundraising effort.

Because you reached down and gave what you could, the Big Push for Midwives campaign's "50+ Shades of Green for CPMs" fundraiser was a pretty solid success.

Although we did not quite reach our goal of $5,000 (and anyone who wants to tip us over the top is still happily encouraged to do so), we got SOOOO close that our media relaunch is a definite GO.

We are thrilled to report that we will now be able to sign up again with our media software vendor, pay our loyal social-media-maven intern his back wages, and be back to our old PushNewsRelease and PushAlert tricks again real soon.

Don't forget to visit the Newsroom and get signed up for PushAlerts!

If you have any favorite reporters, bloggers, media outlets who you want to make sure are on our lists, please pass their contact info on to [email protected].

The Big Push for Midwives campaign belongs to you.

• It isn't the website alone (although we do have a lovely website).
• It isn't the Facebook page alone (though we're delighted to have so many fans!)
• And it certainly isn't just the steering committee.

We are here to help you in the PushStates out and to keep the Big Push for Midwives campaign going, but we are not a top-down organization, rather, we are the essence of grassroots. The Big Push campaign has always been the work of a coalition of the PushState groups, and our focus has always been to create a mutual-help project for all the consumers and midwives pushing in the statehouses and sharing ideas, strategies, successes, and setbacks to create efficiencies and interconnectivity.

For this coalition to be be sustainable, we realize that it will be necessary for periodic fundraisers. Please think of these as chipping in to keep your coalition going. A natural question is what other sources of funding might be available to us?

Our applications for grants have not been successful for the most part. Grant-makers don't seem to get it that, without licensing CPMs, nothing else really matters much—Medicaid, education, federal "recognition," schmoozing with midwives from the rest of the world, really none of it.

So long as nearly half of the women in the US lack access to Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) just because they live in the wrong state, License First has to be the policy priority. We won't stop sharing this message.

So, again, THANKS SO MUCH to all of you and to everyone else who helped us turn 50+ shades of green into some much-needed green dollars.

Dear Childbirth Professionals, Moms, Dads, and Birth Options Activists:

On behalf of The Big Push for Midwives, a most sincere THANK YOU for all you do to increase pro-midwife and pro-birth options in the U.S. You inspire us.

Before 2012 gets away, please take a breath to think of all you've done this year to push for victories in the ongoing movement to protect our birth rights. Stay encouraged. Note all you have invested in our shared cause! The work continues: together, we're pushing for birth options!

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign is fiscally sponsored by Sustainable Markets Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Support the work of the amazing folks in the PushStates. 

Please donate.

Greetings to all dear friends, colleagues, and fellow Pushers!

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign has had an incredibly busy year! Pushing with you for Certified Professional Midwives, the Big Push is bearing down in the statehouses, on the Hill, and in the media. The Big Push campaign hosted its third PushSummit in August, gathering Pushers from all corners of the PushMap in a lovely little spot in Cary, NC to learn from each others’ successes and to develop strategies for the future.

To keep the momentum going nationwide, The Big Push for Midwives needs your help, now more than ever.

It is with great excitement on this Labor Day 2011 that the Big Push campaign announces a new partnership that will benefit birthing families, midwives, and the Big Push campaign itself – a strategic alliance with MyBirthTeam.com, a new website developed to expand women’s birth care options and choices by matching consumers with maternity care providers who meet their needs. The goal of this partnership is to bring choices to families who don’t know that they have options … and put midwives back on the map, and back into the minds of mothers!

Similar to a dating site, MyBirthTeam connects like-minded families with care providers, helping them find the right match. This is a perfect opportunity to not only educate mainstream women about midwifery options, but also to promote your own practice while supporting The Big Push campaign’s ongoing efforts to provide media, messaging, and strategic planning services to advocates working for licensure in every state.

How does MyBirthTeam work?

Midwives, obstetricians, hospitals, birth centers, as well as other specialized providers such as doulas and lactation consultants and childbirth educators, answer a list of questions about the services they provide. Consumers answer the same list of questions about their birth care preferences. Because midwives and OBs are presented on this site in the same category and are answering the same list of questions, women will often find that a midwife may be the best option for them. By presenting medical and alternative models as equal options, MyBirthTeam has developed a new avenue of reaching and education mainstream women.

Providers pay a $4 monthly fee to be listed on the site. MyBirthTeam will donate $1 of each monthly listing fee to the Big Push for Midwives Campaign and $1 to the March of Dimes Prematurity Awareness Campaign.

The new website launches on Labor Day, highlighting the MyBirthTeam featured organization, which as it turns out is The Big Push for Midwives Campaign! The September goal is to get 250 CPMs to sign up with MyBirthTeam in this win-win opportunity, where CPMs can promote their services while so many other Pushers all work to inform the public of the benefits of midwifery care.

**SPECIAL OFFER**SPECIAL OFFER**  Sign Up Today, Get One FREE Month: Join MyBirthTeam during September and get one free month. The Labor Day deal means the $4 monthly billing won’t start until October 1. Join MyBirthTeam today. Keep Pushing.

Sincerely and in gratitude,
The Steering Committee