Harvest meaning, not minutes
The Summit does not need transcripts of everything participants say. It needs to know what we are noticing, what conditions produce it, where the openings are, and what must carry forward.
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Three-page proposal summary
Download or share the full overview, approach, and investment.
Proposal for Funders for Birth Justice & Equity
A Summit that can think together.
Facilitation, harvesting, and live sensemaking for the 2026 Birth Equity Summit. Measure builds the connective infrastructure that lets dozens of conversations become coherent, usable ecosystem intelligence.
2026 Birth Equity Summit
October 20–22, 2026
Detroit, Michigan
~150 participants
Measure core team
Three people onsite
The progression
Conversation becomes coordination.
01
Conversation
02
Insight
03
Coordination
04
Action
The shift the Summit is designed to produce
Birth justice is not a collection of programs or organizations to fund. It is an ecosystem and an infrastructure that must be intentionally built, resourced, coordinated, and sustained.
Ecosystem
from individual organizations
Infrastructure
from projects
Durability
from scarcity and survival
Capital strategy
from funding transactions
Shared responsibility for the conditions of the field
from separate funder / community roles
Partnership purpose
FBJE has already completed significant intellectual, relational, and design work. Measure's role is not to redesign it — it is to help FBJE bring its vision fully to life.
The Summit has a defined architecture, curated participants, named facilitators, and an Ecosystem Fellow leading a broader intelligence process. Our work is the connective tissue between all of it.
Preserve complexity
Differences and contradictions are themselves ecosystem intelligence. Consensus is not the default measure of a successful conversation.
Center community knowledge
Community knowledge is treated as knowledge — not testimony offered for institutional consumption. People closest to the conditions see what formal datasets cannot capture.
Build from what is already moving
Harvesting asks who or what is already in motion, distinguishing opportunities needing something new from existing work needing investment, connection, protection, or amplification.
What success looks like
- Community participants recognize their knowledge in what was captured.
- Funders leave with a deeper understanding of the conditions, power, capital, and institutional practices shaping the ecosystem.
- Differences remain visible where genuine differences exist.
- Existing community leadership and infrastructure do not disappear beneath new ideas.
- Participants can identify where continued coordination has real potential — and where it does not.
- FBJE and its Ecosystem Fellow receive structured, intelligible information they can carry into deeper analysis.