About Ground Work
Ground Work is a biweekly publication at the intersection of care, capital, and birth work. It exists because the people doing the most important work in reproductive health and the people with resources to support it are rarely in the same conversation. This publication is that conversation.
Every other Tuesday, Ground Work arrives in your inbox with eight sections that hold different parts of the whole. A seasonal opening rooted in personal reflection. An herbal ally tied to the work of the season. A main essay that names what is actually happening in policy, systems, and the industry. Something practical you can use before the next issue arrives. A collective energetic read that holds the emotional current underneath all of it. Curated links worth your time. A new voice brought into the room. And a closing question to sit with rather than rush past.
The structure is intentional. This is not just information. It is a practice.
Who is writing this
I am Sabia Wade. I became a doula in 2015 as a volunteer with the Prison Birth Project in Massachusetts, working with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated pregnant people navigating some of the most hostile reproductive health conditions in the country. That experience taught me something I have never been able to unsee: money and reproductive justice have always been connected. The fact that they are rarely discussed together is not an accident. It is a design.
Since then I have trained doulas, founded organizations, sat in boardrooms, studied plants, and become an investor in the communities I care most about. I have been a founder, an executive director, a strategist, a board president, and an interim CEO. I write from all of those seats at once, which means I can translate in every direction.
Ground Work is my record of that work. Not a summary of it. A live document of what it looks like to move through this intersection with intention, curiosity, and accountability.
Who this is for
Ground Work is written for birth workers who need business and policy support, and for investors who need ground level context before writing another check in maternal health. It is also for advocates, organizers, funders, practitioners, and anyone who believes care deserves better systems than the ones we have inherited.
What Common Grounders share is not a profession or a credential. It is a belief. That every person deserves the conditions to decide whether, when, and how they bring life into the world. That care is not charity. That the systems shaping reproductive life were built by people who never had to depend on them. And that we can do better, not someday, but now, with intention and with each other.
How to be part of it
Ground Work publishes every Tuesday. The newsletter arrives every other Tuesday with all eight sections. On the alternating Tuesdays, the Ground Work blog publishes the full essay so you can go deeper between issues.
It is free. It will always be free.
Subscribe to receive every issue in your inbox. Between issues, the community gathers in the Common Ground channel on Instagram, where the conversation continues and the people behind the work get to know one another beyond the page.
You did not stumble into this. The ground has always been here. You are arriving.