Cleveland nonprofit aims to save moms and babies. Neighbors say 'not here.'

March was a banner month for Birthing Beautiful Communities, a nonprofit devoted to helping Black mothers and babies survive – and thrive.

The Cleveland-based organization received its largest-ever donation, a $2 million gift from billionaire MacKenzie Scott. And leaders were closing in on a long-held dream of bringing Ohio’s only freestanding, Black-led birthing center to the city’s East Side.

But things weren’t going so smoothly in the Hough neighborhood.

A few dozen neighbors were opposing the birthing center. They spoke out at public meetings. They circulated a petition. And they made it clear that nothing will change their minds.

“Whoever wants it here, please build it by their house. Not mine,” said Iyesha Ivey, one of those neighbors.

Debates over what gets built – and who decides – aren’t unusual in Northeast Ohio. But the players in this story are. On one side, there’s a small but vocal group of residents focused on their block. On the other, a nonprofit looking at a much broader landscape.

“We are trying to transform Cuyahoga County,” said Jazmin Long, the organization’s CEO. “And this just happens to be an incredible location for us to do that.”

City Architecture

Plans for the birthing center show a three-story building on the north side of Chester Avenue, between East 63rd and East 65th streets. That land has been vacant for decades.

Most of the property is city-owned. Birthing Beautiful Communities bought the only privately held lot in early March from sellers who once lived next door.

This week, Cleveland City Council will discuss a broader zoning code update that will impact Hough – and make the birthing center much easier to build.

Birthing Beautiful Communities still hopes to start construction this fall. But that timeline depends on city approvals at public meetings that can become battlegrounds.

“I just don’t want to be in a place where we have to worry about people constantly coming in and out of our community,” said Ivey, who lives on East 65th Street.

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She and other nearby homeowners say the birthing center – a $12.5 million project – will hurt property values. In a letter submitted to the city, they claim the building will be a “nuisance,” bringing noise, crime and strangers to their street.

“Would you want a McDonald’s next to your house? Would you want a gas station?” said Harry Cooke, president of the Hough Heights Street Club.

He and his neighbors want for-sale homes, instead. Or green space.

“I’d rather see a park there, if we couldn’t get market-value houses,” said Cooke, who has lived on East 65th Street since 1998. “But definitely not that building. And I mean that with venom. Because I know what it’s going to do to this block.”

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‘People are calling us now’

Founded in 2014, Birthing Beautiful Communities has deep roots in Hough – a predominately Black neighborhood where the infant death rate is more than three times the national average.

The nonprofit trains and provides doulas, who give mothers physical and emotional support before, during and after childbirth. Clients get that help for free, along with classes on breastfeeding, nutrition, parenting and other topics.

The organization is staffed by – and largely devoted to – Black women, who face outsize risks of pregnancy complications. In Ohio, the maternal death rate for Black women was almost twice that of white women in 2019, according to a study published in JAMA, a medical journal.

The trend is similar for severe health problems caused or worsened by pregnancy and childbirth. The Ohio Department of Health found that Black women experienced those conditions at nearly twice the rate of white women between 2016 and 2019.

In Cuyahoga County, most of the women who die from suspected pregnancy-related causes are Black, based on state data spanning 2008 to 2016. Those are the most recent and local numbers available.

Researchers say there are many reasons for those disparities , including stress, racism and poor medical care.

“Regardless of your socioeconomic status,” Long said, “we unfortunately face these horrific outcomes. … The average BBC client is every kind of African-American woman that you could possibly imagine, from the (nursing assistant) to the CEO of a company.”

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Birthing Beautiful Communities started planning for a birthing center – an expansion into medical care – seven years ago. Staffed by midwives, the facility will offer unmedicated births for clients who want an alternative to the traditional hospital experience.

These will be low-risk deliveries in bedroom-like suites equipped with birthing tubs. There will be enough space for family members to attend if mothers want their support.

Desired Designs

“You have to be a certain type of person to want to have this kind of birth,” Long said. “And we know it’s going to be an overwhelming response. People are calling us now. ‘Is the birth center open? Is the birth center open? Is the birth center open?’”

Finding a home for the project, which also will include the nonprofit's offices and a community space, wasn’t easy. Freestanding birthing centers must be close to hospitals in case a mother has to be moved during or after labor. And they need to be easy to get to, with enough parking for clients and staff.

Early on, Birthing Beautiful Communities looked near East 86th Street and Wade Park Avenue. Sketches of that site also show housing, which is not part of the project today. Another possible location was off East 66th Street, where Birthing Beautiful Communities once leased office space.

Neither prospect panned out. It was tricky – or way too expensive – to get control of private properties. So, the nonprofit started looking at city-owned lots, which are cheaper.

Most of the 0.73-acre site on Chester has been languishing in Cleveland’s land bank for years. “There is no site that is more perfect for our project than this one,” Long said.

City Architecture

‘Change is coming’

That part of Hough is seeing a surge in investment. In 2019, Dave’s Markets opened a grocery store on the south side of Chester Avenue. MAGNET, a manufacturing-focused nonprofit, recently turned a former school down the block into offices and a hands-on learning lab.

And the Cleveland Foundation, one of Birthing Beautiful Communities’ funders, is just a short walk away, on a growing campus at East 66th and Euclid Avenue.

“Change is coming,” said LaJean Ray, who lives on East 73rd Street and runs Fatima Family Center, a Catholic Charities organization in the neighborhood.

She supports the birthing center project and is baffled by neighbors’ resistance.

“I could see it if it was a bar. But it’s not,” she said.

“It’s a win for the community, and a win for health care for African-American women and their children,” Ray added. “We’re a family-friendly neighborhood. How can we not support having new babies? How can we not?”

Nearby homeowners said they have no problem with the birthing center concept. But it’s all about the location.

“We love their mission. Their mission is very well-needed,” said George Rivers, who also lives on East 65th Street. “The space that they’re trying to put the building on is not adequate.”

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Ivey and her husband, Dennis, bought the priciest home on the block in 2021.

Their house, built in 1999, has five bedrooms and six bathrooms. The couple shares the space with Ivey’s mother-in-law, son, daughter and two grandchildren.

“I paid $380,000 for my house,” Ivey said. “I don’t want to be beside a commercial property. At all.”

Earlean Williams, a longtime homeowner on East 63rd Street, once hoped to buy the vacant lot next door and maintain it as green space. Now that land is part of the project site. And Williams worries that the birthing center’s parking lot will become a gathering place.

“There might even be fights,” Harry Cooke said. “Because you might have a woman that is going to have a baby, and the husband or boyfriend don’t want that baby. There might be arguments. And anything might jump off up in there.”

Ivey said that Birthing Beautiful Communities says it serves a different population.

Asked what that means, she paused. “Income,” Ivey said.

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‘Just heartbreaking’

“What I’m hearing is that we don’t want poor Black women to use this facility in our neighborhood,” said Long, who is struggling to respond to some of the objections.

“We can provide answers,” she said. “But those answers don’t seem sufficient.”

Birthing Beautiful Communities does serve low-income women in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. Long said all clients, regardless of their circumstances, deserve dignity.

But the birthing center will accept private insurance and out-of-pocket payments in addition to Medicaid. That’s how the business plan is designed. The facility will include four birthing suites, enough to accommodate 350 births per year.

“I think that women and birthing people will come from all over the state, because we don’t have another option like this,” Long said.

Hough is still a poor neighborhood despite pockets of middle-class stability.

The median household income there is about $19,000 a year, according to census data. It’s a place where a $200,000 home cozies up to a house that’s worth only $20,000.

“We live in a very depressed ward where people don’t have these kinds of services,” said William Myers, the pastor of New Mount Zion Baptist Church on East 71st Street.

He scoffed at the idea that a birthing center would drive down home values.

“I can’t even think of why anybody would be against it,” he said.

If the site on Chester Avenue falls through, Myers is willing to put the birthing center on surplus land the church owns. But the church’s property is tucked more deeply into the neighborhood. It’s not on a major corridor, with high visibility and easy freeway access.

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Like Myers, Ward 7 Councilwoman Stephanie Howse-Jones grew up in Hough.

At times like this, though, she struggles to recognize the place.

“We are talking about combating maternal mortality,” she said. “And if you cannot find places within your own community to work on the solution, where’s it gonna happen?”

She’s listened at community meetings. And she’s appalled by what she’s hearing.

“It is just heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. To know that your neighbors don’t want you. Don’t think that you’re worthy of investment,” she said.

Howse-Jones sees no point in trying to shift the birthing center to another property, where it might prompt a similar not-in-my-backyard battle.

“People want what they want, and that’s fine. Right? My responsibility is to all,” she said, describing neighborhood quarrels as an unfortunate distraction.

“I don’t have the luxury to be distracted,” she said. “Because we are losing lives in our community. We can’t get people to be mentors. We can’t get people to be coaches for families who might be in crisis.

“But we’re going to spend years fighting over a place that’s trying to add some value to our community? Got it.”

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‘We keep going’

Last year, the city council committed $1 million in federal pandemic-stimulus money to the birthing center. So far, Birthing Beautiful Communities has raised almost $5 million for the project from public, private and philanthropic sources.

The nonprofit is in the middle of a broader fundraising campaign to expand services and boost its endowment, a long-term financial cushion.

“We are really thinking about this in a holistic way,” Long said.

The goal is to seek final city design approvals for the birthing center in June.

Harry Cooke, one of the project's most outspoken critics, recently tried to challenge a preliminary approval by the Cleveland City Planning Commission. But the city rejected his appeal on the grounds that it was filed too late – and that a conceptual decision can’t be appealed.

The neighbors could try appealing again at a later stage of the public process. In other situations, homeowners in Cleveland have sued to prevent nearby developments.

Citing the cost of a legal battle, Cooke said litigation isn’t likely here.

But, he said, “We don’t like to lose. You know what I mean? Even when I was a little boy, I used to shoot marbles. I hated to lose. So I fought. And tried to get my marbles back. And I did.”

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Ivey, meanwhile, is considering whether to sell her house.

She couldn’t even bring herself to look at drawings of the project, which Birthing Beautiful Communities tweaked to address neighbors’ concerns about lights, fences and traffic.

Ivey sees no way that the birthing center and its neighbors can coexist.

“I think it’s time for my husband and I, and my family, to start looking for another place to buy,” she said.

After a committee discussion this week, the city council could vote June 3 on a zoning overhaul that will impact Hough – and smooth the path for this project. In mid-March, the planning commission approved the zoning update, a long-anticipated shift to a form-based code in several places.

Under the new code, the birthing center won’t require any special approvals.

Today, though, the project would need a zoning change – an OK from the city's busy Board of Zoning Appeals. The land is zoned for multifamily development, including apartment buildings of up to five stories. The new code will open it up to broader uses – but limit construction to three stories.

“We’re gonna put a shovel in the ground no matter what,” said Long, who still hopes to open the birthing center in late 2025.

The opposition is disheartening, she said. But she’s not deterred.

“We keep going,” she said. “We keep going.”