Birth Roots Maine

The Pollinator Parade & Picnic is just 1 week away 🐝 🦋

At Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm in Falmouth, Maine on Saturday, May 16th 9:30 - 12:30 🐞

A special thank you to our community partners for helping make this event happen: Maine Audubon, The Children's Nursery School, Book Fairy Pantry Project, Ketcha Outdoors, TimberNook of Greater Portland, Maine (Bedrock Play), Girl Scouts of Maine, Baby Roots Maine, Community Doulas, Greater Portland Health, Creekside Hollow, Love Lab Studio, & La Leche Leage of Portland, Maine 🐛

Meet Kassidy! Kassidy will be helping Birth Roots complete a comprehensive literature review during her summer session at University of Southern Maine.

Hello everyone! I am Kassidy Plummer, a Master of Public Health student at the University of Southern Maine who will be assisting in a literature review for Birth Roots this summer. When I am not attending classes, I work full time at Unum Insurance in Portland, Maine and enjoy spending time with family and friends outdoors in nature or playing pickleball! Previous to my master's program and working at Unum, I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of New England in Medical Biology (pre-med), and had some amazing opportunities to work with local Maine organizations including Partners for World Health and the Maine Cancer Genomics Initiative. Looking towards my future, I am currently interested in epidemiology and maternal health, and hope to find a future career that could potentially blend the two together. I am extremely excited to get started on this project and have a small part in supporting the work of Birth Roots!

We're so grateful for our community!

Have you attended one of our classes? Leave us a Google review: https://g.page/r/CahZIWdtjSfSEBM/review

At we often play 1,2,3, JUMP! from our toddler height . When we opened up the this spring we had to admit that one of our favorite stumps for this activity - due to its size (10" tall by 36" diameter) was 'all used up' 😕 As fate would have it, Alyson's grandmother had to remove the oak tree from her yard this spring that Alyson swung from as a child! The old oak with 47 tree rings LIVES ON at Baby Roots Nature Camp as our new 1,2,3 Jump Stump! 🤩 If you have any hardwood trees removed from your yard, we are always looking for fresh stumps that are wider than they are tall, for example, 18 inches tall and 24+ inches wide, send them our way! There are still a few spots left in the May Nature Camp Sessions!

2 weeks until the Pollinator Parade & Picnic 🐝 There's still time to get your tickets 🦋

At Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm in Falmouth, Maine on Saturday, May 16th 9:30 - 12:30 🐞

A special thank you to our community partners for helping make this event happen: Maine Audubon, The Children's Nursery School, Book Fairy Pantry Project, Ketcha Outdoors, TimberNook of Greater Portland, Maine (Bedrock Play), Girl Scouts of Maine, Baby Roots Maine, Community Doulas, Greater Portland Health, Creekside Hollow, Love Lab Studio, & La Leche Leage of Portland, Maine 🐛

Tot Tunes wrapped up this week, and we are so excited to gather outside next week for Baby Roots Nature Camp! Just a couple spots are left in the Mon/Wed/Thurs/Fri sessions. There's still time to sign up by heading to the Classes & Events page on our website. We hope to see you there 🌱🌷

We couldn’t let April 2026 slip by without honoring an important anniversary of visionary leadership ✨

In April of 2021, Birth Roots accomplished something it hadn’t been able to do in seventeen years, hiring our first ever Executive Director, Kate McCarthy!

Not only did Kate step into a role without a blueprint, she did so twelve months into the upheaval of a pandemic with no defined end date. She wrapped her arms around a beloved organization that had been built entirely out of the sheer will and force of its founders’ determination. She took on the unglamorous, essential work of building out structures and practices that had lived in intention for years, waiting for the organizational infrastructure to catch up.

In just five years, she has led Birth Roots through immense transformation. Kate’s leadership capacity translated to a Data Innovation Project Fellowship awarded to Birth Roots by USM’s Muskie School, establishment of our first sliding scale equitable pricing structure, and the launch of our Shared Identity Groups.

Kate’s Executive Directorship is essentially matriarchal leadership. Not a leadership that claims credit, but a leadership that builds capacity. Not leadership that manages from a distance, but leadership that stays close to the work, close to the values, and close to the families this organization exists to serve.

Please join us in a standing ovation honoring Kate McCarthy this month. What she has accomplished in just five years at Birth Roots is a template for what it looks like when an organization's stated values and its actual practices finally meet. And she made that possible.

Kate, there are so many more examples of how you defy gravity, too numerous to name here. From the bottom of our hearts and on behalf of every family whose new and early parenthood was anchored and stabilized because of infrastructure you build: thank you.

Birth Roots is more itself because of you. 🌱🌸