Our Model
Why we go looking for the deserts first.
The Problem We Start With
Across the United States, a significant share of counties have no hospital offering obstetric care, no birth center, and not a single practicing midwife.
These maternity care deserts aren’t only rural. A neighborhood two miles from a major medical center can be just as underserved — not for lack of buildings, but for lack of trust, access, and providers who reflect the community walking through the door.
The federal government has a name for both kinds of scarcity: Health Professional Shortage Areas. CCSM has a simpler one — the places we go looking for first.
What We’re Actually Solving For
The United States loses mothers and babies at rates no peer nation would accept, and Black and Indigenous families carry the heaviest share of that loss.
Closing that gap isn’t a matter of more research. It’s a matter of more midwives, trained the right way, placed in the right places, and trusted to work. That’s the standard CCSM was built to meet — getting to the heart of the matter, one mother, one baby, one family at a time.
An Infrastructure We’re Restoring, Not Inventing
Midwives ran the maternity care of this country for generations before that care was consolidated elsewhere — and Black midwives, in particular, were pushed out of rooms they had safely staffed for decades.
CCSM doesn’t consider community midwifery a new idea. We consider it unfinished business: infrastructure this country built, then dismantled, that we are putting back in place — one licensed, competent, autonomous midwife at a time.
Autonomy Is the Point, Not the Risk
An independent midwife isn’t a less-supervised version of a hospital provider. She’s a differently accountable one — accountable to her client, her community, and her own competency, built through rigorous clinical training rather than institutional hierarchy.
CCSM trains for that autonomy deliberately: reliable, dependable, safety-first practice that stands on its own, because the communities we serve deserve providers who can be fully present for them — not partially available inside someone else’s system.
A Collegiate Partner in the Perinatal Ecosystem
CCSM doesn’t see itself outside the systems of maternal-child health — we see ourselves as a necessary part of them. We work alongside researchers, collaborate with institutions on community-led program design, and stand in relationship with funders and philanthropic partners who share the goal of a fully staffed, equitable perinatal workforce.
This problem is too large for any one organization to solve alone, and too urgent to solve slowly.
The Uniqueness of Midwifery, The JJ Way
CCSM’s curriculum was built on a model developed and tested inside Commonsense Childbirth’s own clinics for decades before it became a school: The JJ Way. The outcomes speak for themselves — measurably safer births, measurably better engagement, for the families most often failed by the systems around them.
That’s what a CCSM graduate carries with her into every community she serves — not just a license, but a proven model.