Mothering Co/Lab
fostering equity-oriented perinatal substance use monitoring
goal
promoting justice for mothers, their families, and communities
overview
The Mothering Co/Lab is a partnership between the Grandmothers of the seven Interior Region Nations, the BC First Nations Data Governance Initiative, Perinatal Services of BC, Interior Health, and the Co/Lab to extend and refine shared commitments to equity-oriented perinatal substance use monitoring.
what we are doing
The Mothering Co/Lab is applying the BC Human Rights Commissioners’ framework: Disaggregated Demographic Data Collection in British Columbia: The Grandmother Perspective to the contexts of perinatal substance use monitoring, surveillance, and reporting. Under the guidance of Lead Grandmothers, Ms. Gwen Phillips (who coined the concept of the “Grandmother’s Perspective’ in the Framework) and Hereditary Chief Sophie Pierre of Ktunaxa Nation, the research team will explore how to apply the Grandmother’s Perspective to collecting data on substance use during pregnancy for the explicit goal of promoting justice for mothers, their families, and communities.
The Co/Lab is the first population health observatory of its kind to bring together community-led processes alongside formalized monitoring and surveillance for action- and equity-oriented data. Through the first systematic application of the Grandmother Perspective, the Mothering Co/Lab partnership extends the Co/Lab’s equity-oriented framework for substance use monitoring to the context of perinatal substance use, with distinct attention to anti-colonial and anti-racist approaches to data disaggregation