Marla has spent the last decade turning her own hardest chapter into her community's greatest resource.
At Marla's age of 55, she brings a rare combination to her work: the clinical grounding of medical training, the lived wisdom of chronic illness, and the trust that comes from showing up, again and again, for Black birthing families.
Her path started in her twenties, when she entered medical school as a single mother, earning a 3.79 GPA while raising her child alone. In her fourth year, a disability she now manages successfully forced her to leave the program — a loss that could have ended her career in health entirely. Instead, once her health stabilized, she rebuilt her path from the ground up, spending the past ten years as a Peer Support Specialist, a Perinatal Community Health Worker, and a birth and postpartum doula.
In that decade, she has witnessed firsthand the quieter forms of harm — the dismissed pain, the ignored symptoms, the assumptions — that too often shape Black birthing people's experiences of care. That witness became a calling: to become a Certified Professional Midwife, so she can offer her community not just support at the margins of the system, but full, skilled, culturally rooted care at its center.
Midwifery education isn't eligible for federal financial aid, which makes your help essential — not a convenience, but the difference between deferring this dream again and finally living it. Marla isn't approaching this as a new direction; it's the completion of a calling she's carried for thirty years, sharpened by everything she's survived and learned along the way.
Any financial support you can give to my dream will be greatly appreciated.
