It’s 10am on Saturday, January 17th and Changemaker Institute participants are discussing what it means to enter other communities. It’s an issue that approaches the very core of social entrepreneurship, understanding the people you wish to serve and serving them in a way that is informed by their culture and experiences, not yours. But what does that actually look like?

Today, the Institute is fortunate to be joined by Kathryn Hall-Trujillo, an Ashoka Global Social Entrepreneur and founder of The Birthing Project USA, “The Underground Railroad for New Life.” Her project works to improve birthing outcomes for pregnant women of color by providing practical support before, during and after birth.

This morning, Ms. Trujillo, or “Mama Kat,” is talking about her work as a social entrepreneur and the path she’s taken to finding empathy. After she is introduced by Elias, Mama Kat turns to him and says, “You have such a lovely smile…It’s so nice to do something when you know someone is supporting you, and smiling at you.” And in a way, the immense support demonstrated by a simple smile is at the heart of what Mama Kat shares with us.

“Black women [in the United States] tend to give birth 4-6 weeks early,” Mama Kat explains. The reason? Stress. Women of color will often develop infections during their pregnancies that are brought on by the stress they experience from systemic inequalities like racism and a lack of essential support. That missing support, Mama Kat explains, can come in the form of another woman emotionally investing in your pregnancy, saying things like “I’m so glad you’re pregnant, I’m so excited for you to have a baby.” But Mama Kat’s work goes much farther than providing pregnant women with words of encouragement. In a way that is comfortable and conversation, Mama Kat talks with us about how she approaches underserved communities with empathy. “Some people say, ‘I’m going to give someone a fish.’ Some people say, ‘I’m going to teach someone to fish.’ At Ashoka,” Mama Kat flashes her beautiful smile, “we say, ‘I’m going to change the fishing industry.’”

She goes on to say that, on a fundamental level, serving your target community is less about aspiring for greatness on a personal level and more about placing your aspirations on the people you’re working with. In other words, you must aspire to empower the “underserved” to become your colleague. How does this happen? Mama Kat says that learning about your community cannot simply be achieved through the basic question and answer model, rather it is achieved by working alongside the people you hope to serve. “When you work together you see things you would not have thought to ask [about].”

Mama Kat then presents a concrete example from her work about the assumptions we may hold about the communities we serve. She pulls out two pouches, which she calls birthing kits. For just $5 – the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks or a beer – people can pay for a birthing kit that will go directly toward saving the life of a woman in labor. Originally, Mama Kat chose black for the pouches as a means of keeping them neutral and also because she thought dirt would be less visible. She found, however, that far from neutral, black actually signifies death in many cultures. Now the kits are pink. She opens the kit and explains that now each pouch also includes actual directions for how to birth a child, a feature she added once she realized that many of the people facilitating births with these kits had never actually done delivered a baby. Something that was even more surprising to Mama Kat, however, was when one of the mothers that received a birthing kit told her it was the first purse she had ever owned.

The Changemaker Institute is extremely fortunate to be off to such an inspiring start. The presence of Kathryn Hall-Trujillo in the Institute as a community mentor and practitioner of social entrepreneurship will prove an invaluable resource and we are excited to learn from her wealth of experience!