Lisa N. Brown, SCD, CCHW, PA, is a Southern birth worker, griot, and author of systems that honor the full humanity of birthing families and the workers who serve them. For more than thirty years — across community birth spaces, legislative chambers, clinical research facilities, disability rights offices, and the deeply personal terrain of maternal loss, survival, and healing — she has practiced a singular conviction: that birth is sacred, that care must be just, and that neither is possible without transforming the systems that surround them.

She is the Founder and Owner of Motherwit Akoma Services, LLC (dba Motherwit Birth Services), through which she supports birthing families, mentors birth workers, and builds innovative programs at the intersection of direct community practice and structural accountability. She is also the Founder/Author of the Reparative Birth Systems Initiative (RBSI), a community-governed framework for birth justice rooted in the domains of Recognition, Reckoning, and Repair —designed to advance equitable policy, community-led knowledge, and systemic accountability across Virginia’s maternal health landscape. RBSI is
fiscally sponsored by Elephant Circle.

Among the most consequential contributions of her career is her service on the Virginia Doula Taskforce and the Medicaid Doula Implementation Workgroup, where her advocacy helped make Virginia the fourth state in the nation to implement Medicaid coverage for doula care. That policy victory — years in the making and deeply fought — has expanded access to dignified birth support for thousands of Virginia families who would otherwise navigate labor and delivery alone. She continues to shape Virginia’s maternal and child health policy landscape as the Policy & Legislative Advisor for the Doula Association of Virginia (DAVA), where she works at the intersection of legislative advocacy, workforce development, and Medicaid systems. Lisa’s organizational presence in Virginia’s birth justice ecosystem is deliberately distributed. She serves simultaneously as Cofounding Member of the Virginia Alliance for Community
Midwifery (VACM), Grants Administrator for Jamii Birth and Wellness Collective (JBWC), and Logistics and Administrative Coordinator for the Healing Histories Project, a national collaborative focused on the Medical Industrial Complex, healing, justice, and transformative systems change. She is a Co-Founder and former Deputy Executive Director of Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, where she served for seven years and provided support to hundreds of Virginia families across pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. She holds ongoing Virginia state advisory appointments, including the Breastfeeding-Friendly Designation Program Advisory Council and Substance-Exposed Infants (SEI) Plan Workgroup - Education Committee.

Her professional background is deliberately cross-sector and spans human resources, workforce development, disability advocacy, federal grant administration, FDA-regulated clinical research, nonprofit governance, and community engagement. As a Human Resource Professional and ADA Coordinator at Martha Jefferson Hospital, she ensured equitable workplace access and compliance with federal disability rights protections — experience that forged a lifelong commitment to institutional accountability, inclusion, and the ethics of care. She has administered federal grants at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (NIH, NSF, HRSA) and at the Virginia Department of Health during the ARRA period. In clinical research at PRA Health Sciences, she held direct responsibility for ethics training compliance in an FDA regulated environment — a foundation that now informs her approach to developing ethics education for Virginia’s birth worker workforce. She is pursuing Professional Certificate in Project Management, Virginia Tech (December 2026); a Health Equity Academy Fellowship, Families USA (2024); and has completed Partners in Policymaking, the Movement Matters Organizing Institute, and HRSA CityMatch leadership programs.

As an ethics educator, Lisa developed the Motherwit Doula Ethics Intensive — a two-course, ten-hour training series integrating justice-centered pedagogy with the regulatory requirements of Virginia’s State-Certified Doula credential. The series addresses VCB Knowledge Areas 5 and 8 and covers the full arc of ethical doula practice: from personal values and scope of practice to the VCB Code of Ethics, mandatory reporting law, surveillance harm, documentation ethics, social media consent, dual relationships, cultural humility, and peer accountability. Her approach to ethics is not transactional. It is relational, systemic, and grounded in the belief that ethical practice requires continuous self-examination, honest community accountability, and the courage to name what systems are doing to the families being served. Her direct practice spans more than three decades of community birth work, lactation support, and domestic violence and intimate partner violence advocacy — work she began in 2004 in formal roles and had already been shaped toward by lived experience long before. She trains and mentors birth workers in professional boundaries, client autonomy, trauma-informed care, harm reduction, advocacy within scope, culturally responsive support, and ethical documentation. She served as a reviewer for Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital’s Virginia Maternity Center Breastfeeding-Friendly Designation application, and her work with Jamii Birth and Wellness Collective has included developing a comprehensive RFI response repositioning the organization’s mobile clinic model for DMAS review.

A mother of three children and the primary caregiver for her mother, Lisa carries the weight and joy of family across every dimension of her work. She does not separate the personal from the political, the professional from the sacred, or the local from the structural.

Her work bridges systems transformation and personal transformation — helping individuals, organizations, and communities build futures rooted in dignity, justice, compassion, and collective care.