Last week, the North Miami Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) approved a $250,000 Business Attraction Grant to support the creation of a community-centered maternal health and wellness facility, helping address South Florida’s growing shortage of maternity care.
The vision belongs to Olamina Properties LLC, a joint venture between Black-led nonprofits Southern Birth Justice Network (SBJN) and Magnolia Birth House. The two organizations had already been searching for a home where they could bring their plan to fruition for months when The Miami Times first reported on the matter in July 2025. A failed attempt to bring the facility to Miami Gardens forced organizers to reassess, eventually landing them in North Miami with renewed momentum.
Now backed by the CRA grant, the Olamina team is on track to transform a former pet shop in the city into what organizers say will be the first nonprofit birthing center in South Florida offering culturally competent, community-based care.
Filling the gap
The CRA’s approval comes amid a wave of maternity unit closures in Miami-Dade County and across the country. During the meeting, North Miami Vice Mayor Kassandra Timothe described the situation as a growing crisis.
“A lot of maternal units have been closing in South Florida. We’re becoming a birth desert, almost,” she said. “This is definitely a huge need in our community.”
More than 500 hospitals nationwide have closed their labor and delivery units since 2010. Locally, Jackson South Medical Center shuttered its maternity ward last year. North Shore Medical Center closed its labor and delivery, neonatal, and obstetrics units in 2024, along with some centers in North Miami.
Jamarah Amani, executive director of SBJN, said the closures left a significant gap in access to care.
“Those two major facilities that were attending thousands of births every year in that community are now closed,” Amani said. “That’s where we thought North Miami would be an ideal location, and to partner with Magnolia, because they have the knowledge of how to set up, license, and operate a birth center.”
The vision
SBJN and Magnolia Birth House formed Olamina Properties LLC through The Miami Foundation’s Collective Real Estate Ownership (CREO) initiative, a Wells Fargo-sponsored grant program that helps small businesses, artists and nonprofits purchase commercial property in historically underserved communities. Olamina secured $500,000 through the program, allowing the partnership to eventually purchase the North Miami property in September 2025.
The center will be called “Olamina Birth Center.” The name “Olamina,” Amani said, is inspired by Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Parable series.
"Olamina is a Yoruba word that actually means ‘wealth,’" Amani said. "That character was pioneering a new community when society was shutting down — a place that was safe where people could live with dignity. That’s our vision: a safe haven for birthing people, a place where births are dignified and sacred.”
The center is planned to include three birthing suites, a midwife suite, two prenatal exam rooms, five offices, and a flexible community room for classes, support groups, and events. Office space will also be available for health and wellness practitioners to rent.
Renovations are expected to cost about $850,000 and will include major plumbing and electrical upgrades, new windows, exterior improvements, and a 500-square-foot expansion. The CRA grant will fund a significant portion of that work.
“It’s a big investment in the vision of having a birth and wellness center that’s available to the community,” Amani said. “We want people to walk in and feel like, ‘Oh, I’m in my home giving birth.’”
SBJN hopes to open the center in early 2027.
Maternal health disparities
At the core of the project is an effort to confront racial inequities in maternal health. In Miami-Dade County, Black women are five times more likely to die from childbirth-related causes than white women.
"We want to reach families that may not have access to these services, and that doesn’t necessarily just mean low income,” Amani said.
She pointed to multiple barriers to care, including lack of insurance, high deductibles, transportation challenges, work demands, and gaps in cultural competency. Amani noted that birth centers and midwives are often lower-cost alternatives to hospitals and obstetricians.
SBJN does not turn patients away due to inability to pay or lack of insurance, she said. The organization works with Medicaid and private insurers when possible, using grant funds to cover uninsured patients or unaffordable copayments. It also prioritizes language access, offering services in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.
“‘Am I going to walk into this space and see people who look like me, understand my culture, who speak my language?’” Amani said. “We’re here to bridge that gap.”
She said SBJN’s data already shows improved outcomes among the families it serves.
“The moms that we work with have higher rates of vaginal birth. They breastfeed longer. They’re less sick, their babies are less sick,” Amani said. “That has a lot to do with the care they receive throughout pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.”
Amani says SBJN’s work is made even more crucial by Florida's broader reproductive healthcare crisis, defined by declining birth rates, maternity unit closures, rising insurance costs, lack of Medicaid expansion and abortion restrictions.
SBJN Mobile Clinic interior.
In response to these trends, the nonprofit created a policy and education branch known as the Florida Birth Justice Coalition to inform policymakers and the public about how midwives, doulas, and birth centers improve outcomes and lower costs.
“Legislators are often making decisions about things they don’t know much about,” Amani said. “So we provide education, research, and even consultation around bill writing, because we want legislation that actually benefits the community.”
SBJN is also bringing community members to Tallahassee next week for its annual Birth Justice Day at the Capitol.
A holistic hub
SBJN currently operates two mobile clinics that provide free and grant-funded perinatal care across Miami-Dade County, including prenatal services, lactation support, diaper distribution, and mutual aid. Those clinics will continue operating as an outreach arm once the North Miami birth center opens.
Beyond births, the new facility is designed as a holistic wellness hub, offering services such as mental health care, nutrition counseling, chiropractic care, acupuncture, massages and more.
The center will also serve as SBJN’s headquarters and a physical home for its education and training programs, including doula training, midwife assistant courses, and community medic workshops. The space will house educational resources through the organization’s Birth Justice Origins Project, which documents the history of Black midwives and the birth justice movement.
"We want to have a place where people can come and just learn, like have a library of birth justice,” Amani said.
Community members can support the project at a Feb. 21 fundraiser celebrating Black History Month.
"Birth Justice (SBJN) was born in Overtown in 2009," Amani said. "Now it’s like a teenager; it’s 17 years old. It’s getting ready to move out and get its own place. It’s a significant time for us to say this is a movement that’s here to stay.”
This story was produced by The Miami Times, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, as part of a content sharing partnership with the WLRN newsroom. Read more at miamitimesonline.com.
