Passing Love Forward
Welcoming a child can be one of life’s most joyful experiences. It can also feel overwhelming and isolating, especially for parents who are separated from their families and traditional support systems.
Lakisa Muhammad understands that experience personally.
After relocating to Phoenix, Arizona, Lakisa gave birth to her third child while living far away from her family. She knew very few people and had to trust a family she barely knew to care for her older children while she went to the hospital.
That experience stayed with her and later inspired a project designed to remind Black birthing families that they are not alone.
“People need encouragement. People need to be told, ‘You are doing a good job,’” Lakisa said. “For Black birthing families, I thought, wouldn’t it be beautiful if they could hear that directly from their community?”
Lakisa is a retired midwife, maternal health advocate, and the founder and CEO of Black Birth Equity Now, a nonprofit organization serving Black birthing families and birth workers in Arizona and South Carolina.
Her work focuses on maternal health, policy change, community education, and improving the experiences of Black families throughout pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum recovery, and early parenting.
Before launching Black Birth Equity Now, Lakisa spent 10 years leading Arizona Birthworkers of Color, a grassroots organization that brought together doulas, midwives, lactation consultants, and other professionals who support families throughout the perinatal period.
After years of community-based leadership, she decided to establish a formal nonprofit focused specifically on supporting Black birthing families and the birth workers advocating for them.
For Lakisa, the work is deeply personal.
“I have been doing this work for more than 20 years,” she said. “I believe I am living in my purpose and doing what I am supposed to do.”
During three community events in 2025, Black Birth Equity Now invited attendees to create handwritten Love Notes for Black birthing families.
Participants were provided with heart-shaped paper, markers, and art supplies and were asked to write encouraging messages to parents they might never personally meet. Some wrote affirmations. Others created artwork. Children drew pictures for the babies and carefully labeled their creations.
By the end of the three events, the organization had collected nearly 200 Love Notes.
Lakisa originally planned to photograph the notes and share them on social media. However, one attendee asked a question that changed the direction of the project.
“How are the families going to receive the notes?”
The question encouraged Lakisa to think beyond online engagement. She began imagining how meaningful it would be for a parent to receive the messages as a physical gift while preparing to give birth or adjusting to life with a newborn.
“I thought about someone arriving at a birth and saying, ‘I have a gift for you,’” Lakisa explained. “Imagine receiving something beautiful from your community that says, ‘You can do this. You are going to be all right. We are supporting you.’”
With support from a Let’s Choose Love catalyst grant, Black Birth Equity Now was able to transform the individual messages into complete Love Notes bundles.
The grant helped cover the space, food, decorations, packaging, and materials needed for a community bundling party held on February 1.
Our community partners from the Beta Mu Sigma Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. volunteered to laminate and carefully cut out nearly 200 hearts before organizing them into 50 individual bundles. Each bundle was placed inside a mesh bag and decorated with African-inspired fabric, cowrie shells, and other thoughtful details.
The organization also included a message encouraging each recipient to pass the Love Notes to another family when they no longer needed them.
That small addition gave the project the potential to extend far beyond the first 50 recipients.
“By laminating the notes and encouraging families to pass them on, the impact can become exponential,” Lakisa said. “We do not know how long those notes will continue traveling or how many people they will touch.”
The completed bundles were distributed during Black Birth Equity Now’s annual Black Maternal Health Week celebration on April 18.
The event brought together families, researchers, doulas, midwives, lactation consultants, and other birth professionals. The bundles were given to trusted birth workers who could deliver them directly to families in hospitals, homes, birthing centers, and community settings.
The organization’s next step is to reconnect with those birth workers and learn how families responded to the gifts.
Lakisa hopes to gather testimonials about what it felt like to deliver the bundles, how parents received the messages, and whether the notes helped anyone feel seen, supported, or less alone.
The beauty of each bundle was also intentional.
Black Birth Equity Now is known for creating welcoming and thoughtfully designed experiences for the people it serves. For Lakisa, providing beautiful spaces and quality materials communicates dignity and worth.
“To us, beauty translates to the worthiness of our community,” she said. “I want people to walk into spaces that feel worthy of them.”
The Love Notes project demonstrates what can happen when a meaningful idea receives the resources it needs to grow.
Nearly 200 handwritten messages became 50 carefully prepared bundles. Those bundles were placed into the hands of trusted professionals and delivered to families who needed encouragement.
Each recipient was then invited to pass that love forward.
Through Black Birth Equity Now, Lakisa is helping create the sense of community she once needed herself and reminding Black birthing families that someone is thinking about them, believing in them, and cheering them on.