About Build Your Nest
The Build Your Nest Mission: To provide parents and professionals with tools and education that promotes REST, SUPPORT, and CARE during the postpartum time.
Our vision is that parents everywhere have REST, SUPPORT, and CARE after their babies are born.
Build Your Nest Values and Understandings
The health of babies, children, and all of society is rooted in maternal health.
Parenting is big, important work of great personal and collective significance.
REST, SUPPORT, and CARE are universal postpartum needs.
We all need rest, support and care, not one particular class or culture. Racial, class, and gender equity are central to this work.
Antiracist ideologies and policies as integral to maternal health.
Not all mothers give birth and not all birthing people identify as mothers, while recognizing that worldwide, the majority of parenting is done by women.
Build Your Nest is inclusive of all genders, sexual orientations, and family structures.
Maternal health solutions need to be community based, recognizing the huge impact in-person relationships have on individual health.
We recognize that postpartum traditions are cultural. We honor and celebrate them, while walking with care and respect, listening to the voices of the people to whom they belong.
Our Story
Having had two very different postpartum experiences and seeing a huge need for cultural shift, Kestrel set out to create change. She wanted to give parents a simple tool that would empower them to work with the resources at hand to have better postpartum experiences. This led her to writing the workbook. In turn, each translation has come into being from a similar response in women around the world: the knowledge that huge change is needed and this can start one family at a time. The workbook is now in 7 languages, with more translations in the works.
Kestrel created the postpartum navigator role in response to existing gaps in maternal health care and the crisis of the pandemic which highlighted the need for greater care.
The community that is forming around Build Your Nest including the translators and postpartum navigators who are doulas, midwives, psychologists, nurses, journalists, social workers -all share a common vision of improving maternal health in their communities.
We share the understanding that postpartum recovery is a basic human right and that the health of mothers and birthing people, is foundational to healthy societies.
No One Right Way
“[Kestrel] Gates opens her text with a very important reminder to readers that there’s “no one right way” to prepare for or process your postpartum experience. Like births, each one is different. A lot of women get caught up in societal or even self-imposed expectations of what this period in their lives should look like but Gates assures that the most important thing be that you “do it your way”.”
Build Your Nest: A Postpartum Planning Workbook is available on Amazon or in bulk options.
