Leseliey Welch, MPH, MBA
Leseliey (she/her) is a public health leader with a business mind and a visionary heart, holding love as a guiding value, a way of being, an action and a politic.
Leseliey is Co-founder of Birth Detroit and Birth Center Equity, a mom and a tireless advocate for work that makes communities stronger, healthier and more free.
Leseliey leads a team of birth workers, birth advocates and community leaders planning Detroit’s first freestanding community birth center Birth Detroit, and is proud of the launch of Birth Center Equity to grow and sustain birth centers led by Black, Indigenous and people of color across the country. She has nearly two decades of leadership experience in city, state and national health organizations. She served as interim executive director of Birthing Project USA, Deputy Director of Public Health for the City of Detroit, and consulted in the development of Michigan’s first comprehensive LGBTQ health center.
Leseliey has taught at the university level for over fifteen years, contributing to the development of Wayne State University’s Bachelor’s in Public Health Program and creating courses on numerous health equity topics for undergraduate and master’s level public health students, medical students and medical residents. Leseliey currently lectures in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Michigan. She earned her undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies, Masters in Public Health with a certificate in Women’s and Reproductive Health, and Masters in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.
A Michigander by birth and a world citizen in spirit, Leseliey resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her wife and two children and loves global travel.
In Her Own Words
What is your favorite quote?
Audre Lorde’s “when I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid” has inspired me since my undergraduate days in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Her life as a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet and her words inspire courage. Also in “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” she writes, “the white fathers told us, “I think, therefore I am.” The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: “I feel, therefore I can be free.”
Her words here are a reminder to dream, to feel, and to trust our creative power.
Who is your favorite woman fundraiser or philanthropist of color?
Bridget “Biddy” Mason was a midwife and nurse who made history as one of the first African American landowners in Los Angeles in the mid-1800s. We visited her memorial during our Birth Detroit co-founders retreat this year.
Born enslaved in 1810 and earning her freedom in 1860, she became a real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist, established the first Black church in LA, founded a school for Black children, and donated to a variety of charities. Her spiritual fortitude and vision reminds me that there is no reason that we cannot take leadership and ownership over our bodies, our own land and our futures.
What inspired you to use your background in women’s and gender studies, public health and business for a career in fundraising and philanthropy?
I love learning for learning’s sake, and for the tools I gain to co-create the world I want to live in. Since the late 1990s, I’ve dedicated my career to health justice and work that makes communities stronger, healthier and more free. Fundraising and philanthropy are tools to realize the vision of Birth Detroit, a first of its kind community birth center in Detroit and a world where birth is safe, sacred, loving and celebratory for all people.
For the national initiative Birth Center Equity, fundraising and philanthropy are among multiple capital tools we are leveraging to ensure a birth center for every community and grow and sustain community birth infrastructure for generations to come.
I love learning for learning’s sake, and for the tools I gain to co-create the world I want to live in.
Where do you want to be in 3 years?
In three years, I want to be celebrating two successful years of Birth Detroit Birth Center caring for families and preparing to expand. I want to be looking at a map of Black, Brown, Indigenous led birth centers across the United States that reflects twice as many as we have now in 2022.
I want us to be moving closer to a day when how we bring our babies into the world is a true moral, ethical, political, economic priority, and all birthing people are valued and well cared for.
Do you have any advice for other women of color entrepreneurs in the realm of philanthropy and fundraising — whether they are in Canada, the United States, or the international WOC community at large?
One of the ways that power maintains power over is by dictating what is and is not possible. Don’t let anyone tell you what is and is not possible. Rooted in purpose, liberatory vision, and the highest and best for all, we co-create the futures we want for ourselves and our communities.
What is one of your proudest accomplishments (career/personal) thus far in your life?
Arundathi Roy has written about the pandemic as a portal. She writes about how pandemics have “forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” how COVID-19 is a “gateway between one world and the next.” The pandemic has been an open portal accelerating my heart’s work in the world. I am most proud of showing up fully and in collaboration with my awesome co-founders to meet the moment.
I am proud of how Birth Detroit showed up for families by opening our first neighborhood midwifery clinic in pandemic (October of 2020) to provide community-based prenatal and postpartum care by midwives and virtual childbirth education.
I am proud of how Nashira Baril and I launched Birth Center Equity (BCE) in April
2020 to show up for Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) birth center leaders across the country.
Locally, in our first year, Birth Detroit Care cared for 100 families and provided childbirth education to 120 - all while continuing to plan for the Birth Detroit Birth Center to open in 2023. Nationally, Birth Center Equity has raised more than $1.5 million and provided COVID rapid response funds and general operating support to more than 25 established and developing BIPOC-led community birth centers.
BCE is also designing a fund to leverage full-spectrum capital to grow and sustain birth centers led by people of color. I couldn’t be more proud of my-founders in both efforts, our board, advisors, partners, funders, donors, networks and communities for the ways in which we have shown up for each other.
We are demonstrating that we are leaders in our own care, and we are inviting others to lead with us in creating a world where all birthing people have access to all safe birth options and maternal health equity is no longer an aspiration but a lived reality.
