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 🐛

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 🐛

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. 🌱🌸