Amy Ard

• The heart-wrenching scene that opened Amy's eyes to the problems of pregnant women in jail (04:51)
• What incarcerated pregnant women needed most (21:21)
• Why caregivers for these babies have so little support (22:23)
• The story of Danielle and her rise from incarcerated mother to program coordinator (29:59)
• Why Amy hopes her organization won't need to exist in the future (38:04)

FRANK BLAKE: So Amy, welcome to Crazy Good Turns. It is a real privilege to have you on the show.

You exemplify Crazy Good Turns if you ask me, so it's great to have you on the show.

AMY ARD: Thank you. I'm excited about our conversation today.

FRANK BLAKE: So let's start maybe for our listeners and go back in time and give the founding story of why you started Motherhood Beyond Bars.

AMY ARD: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia and that part of the story we'll circle back around to.

But for most of my working life I was a childbirth doula and doulas are non-medical support staff for people who are having babies.

And I was working in a hospital in Washington D.C. that really reflects ... It's the same type of hospital that Grady Hospital is.

It's inside the middle of a city.

FRANK BLAKE: So for our listeners who aren't from Atlanta, Grady ... And I don't know the hospital you're in in D.C., but Grady is very much a safety net hospital.

AMY ARD: That's correct. And it's with Washington Hospital Center.

FRANK BLAKE: Okay.

So it's a lot of people who don't have insurance. Under the poverty line.

These are difficult, difficult circumstances.

AMY ARD: That's right.

And my client did not fit that demographic and people choose Washington Hospital Center for lots of reasons the same way people choose Grady for lots of reasons.

And my client needed ice chips and that's a pretty common thing to need in labor.

And so I stepped out into the hall with a glass to fill up with ice chips and the minute I walked out of the door, I was facing a gurney.

Someone had been brought in on an ambulance. There was not a person on the gurney, but there was a pair of handcuffs hanging off the side of it.

And it was an image that just stopped me in my tracks. I'd spent a lot of time on labor and delivery and never seen a pair of handcuffs.

And as I was contemplating that image right in front of me, the door of the room next to the one I was working in opened up and an armed guard walked out.

And an OB friend of mine walked by and I said, "What is happening?" She says, "Oh, that's someone from the county jail."

And it occurred to me in that moment there was a woman who was likely chained to a bed.

I knew she had been chained to a gurney and she was likely chained to a bed staring at an officer who had just stepped out.

There was no one else in the room and she was trying to have a baby.

And at this point I had spent 10 years telling women that they could do this hard thing.

They could bring new life into the world, they could go through labor, they could welcome their child and they could do it because they had a lot of support.

There were people around them that were supporting them.

And in that moment I realized there was a group of women who I had never thought of before.

People who were incarcerated that also had to give birth and what that might look like for them.

And my world turned a little upside down that day.

I went back and I supported my client and I told her she could do hard things with support.

But I came home and started trying to find anything I could about incarceration and pregnancy and what that experience looked like and felt like for women in the United States.

And I found that in many states in 2016, including my home state of Georgia, it was legal to shackle women to beds while they delivered a baby.

And I couldn't abide that.

And I knew that I had more connections in Atlanta, Georgia, more connections statewide.

My background led me through legislative advocacy to direct support of mothers.

And I felt truly a calling in that moment to combine what I had done up to that point in my life and see if I could direct it in this place and to incarcerated women giving birth.

So I told my husband, who had worked for Atlanta Legal Aid in the past ...

He was also ... talk about good turns. Doing very good turns.

And I said, "I think we need to do something crazy." And he said, "I think I've been waiting for you to say that."

And a year later we lived in the house I grew up in with my mom and three children and I didn't know exactly what we were doing.

I knew that I wanted to work with incarcerated people and I didn't know how I was going to do that.

But I did think the first thing I was going to do was try to get the handcuffs off of women.

And so I started working on legislation that ended up passing in 2018 and the governor signed it and is no longer legal in the state of Georgia to shackle pregnant women while they're pregnant, while they're delivering, and six weeks postpartum.

And that was the beginning of my Motherhood Beyond Bars journey.

FRANK BLAKE: So can I ask, I tend to go to more prosaic details sometimes on these things, but did you have a job in Washington and were you leaving a job?

Did you have a new job in Atlanta on something different or were you just throwing yourself full on to Motherhood Beyond Bars?

AMY ARD: I did have a job.

I had founded the largest doula agency in, maybe in the country at that point.

We were doing between three and 500 births a year.

FRANK BLAKE: Would you just explain briefly for our listeners what a doula does and the difference-

AMY ARD: Doula does?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. And the difference between that and a-

AMY ARD: And a midwife Or a doctor. So doulas have training but not medical training.

So they are not going to provide medical care for clients. And doulas are generally hired by a family.

So you don't get a doula as part of your general medical care. All sorts of families hire doulas.

They could be first time moms and dads who have never gone through birth before.

What most families recognize about our medical care in the United States right now is that when you go to have a baby, you will spend a large portion of that time in a hospital room by yourself.

So nurses come and go. Sometimes the obstetrician comes when it is time to push your baby out.

And that may be the first time you've actually seen your midwife or your doctor.

And so most of the people that are hiring a doula are looking for that constant support.

And one of the things I loved about my doula work is that I would go to people's home in early labor and spend early labor with them.

We would travel to the hospital together and I would stay with them through the birth in a couple of hours afterwards and then come back to their home when they'd arrived home with their baby to help them settle in.

It is an intense relationship-based approach to giving birth and it's a unique offering.

And I will also add that for a lot of women, it was an expensive offering.

So at that point it wasn't covered by insurance.

There are some insurance companies that pay for it now, and I had built a team of, I think 10 or 11 doulas at that point that were serving women all over the DMV region.

And what I came to understand is that that support was necessary for every person giving birth, not just the ones that could pay for it.

And so when I saw that woman and understood that she had no one in the room.

Doctors, nurses. She had an armed guard standing by her side.

What it must feel like to be so alone.

And also also importantly in that moment knowing that you might have two hours with your baby after birth before someone comes to take that baby away from you.

And that piece I think was the one that just gutted me the most because I never worked with a woman that knew she was going to have to give up her baby within a couple of hours after giving birth.

And so that constellation of circumstances when I had spent a career basically extolling the virtues of everything that was opposite to that experience, that's when I had my one of many I think midlife crises.

Just like, I've got these skills and I've been given these experiences, how do I want to use them?

FRANK BLAKE: So you left a successful business.

Are you going to Atlanta and stepping into some other position in a business in Atlanta or?

AMY ARD: I came with an idea and a lot of faith and I will say, and a lot of privilege to be able to live in the home that I grew up in in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Atlanta that my parents ...

My parents bought a house in Morningside in 1972 for $32,000.

And the house across the street's a $3 million house now.

So I had a lot of privilege to be able to move my family into a place and explore and learn and listen to what the needs were.

And it was a risk.

My husband came here, he didn't know what we were doing yet either.

He also knew that he wanted to do direct service. And so it was a leap of faith.

FRANK BLAKE: And so walk through the start of this.

You land, you show up at your mother's doorstep, and now you've got to put this burning idea and make it a reality.

AMY ARD: Well, the first thing I did ...

And the reason I knew that Atlanta would be a generative place was that I knew that twice in the history of the Georgia legislature, they had taken up this idea of shackling.

And twice this legislation had not even made it past a committee.

So someone had written a piece of legislation that said, I don't think we should shackle pregnant women.

And two times people had said, "We're not going to discuss that."

And I knew people that had been in the room for those discussions.

And so I met with them and I said, "Walk me through this process. What happened?"

And it became pretty clear quickly that it was not a bipartisan effort.

And in Georgia, in order for something, if Democrats want to start something, it needs to be bipartisan.

So my first plan was to build a bipartisan working group that would take up this issue.

And importantly, we needed to find people who had experienced shackling, who had experienced this.

Because the Georgia Department of Corrections had always been pretty clear, we don't shackle women in birth, we don't do that and so we don't need a piece of legislation telling us not to do it.

But we found people who had experienced it and we also found tragic results.

And that was the turning point I think in our conversations with legislators.

And it actually ended up being a pretty simple process.

We got it through committee, we got it through the house, we got it through Senate almost unanimously.

And that was I think a great entry into working policy in climates like these, is that you have to gather a broad coalition around the table and you also have to let go of good ideas to let the right person carry it.

So the people that wrote that bill around a table together handed it off to our partners and said, "We trust you with this."

Republicans at that point see what we can do together.

And it worked and the governor signed the bill.

And there is a difference between signing legislation and seeing it followed to the letter of the law.

We know that women in our jails, especially across the state, are being handcuffed while they're pregnant.

I hear about it every day.

But there is now a fallback that we can go and educate the workforce to tell them there is a law that outlaws that now.

FRANK BLAKE: But that must have just been the start.

AMY ARD: That was the very start.

FRANK BLAKE: Because that's probably the most gut-wrenching moment.

But I have to think that the problems of Motherhood Beyond Bars, that's just the starting point. Correct.

AMY ARD: So what happened is that in the process of looking for people who had experienced incarceration and pregnancy it opened it felt like almost a portal to a world that most people don't see and don't hear about.

And in the process of working with-

FRANK BLAKE: Including you at that time. Correct?

AMY ARD: Including me. I knew nothing.

I had never been inside of a prison before or a jail.

I met a woman who was a student at Rollins School of Public Health, which is Emory's Public Health School. Emory University.

And as part of her education there, she was placed in a prison to do contextual education and her name is Bethany Kotler.

And she quickly realized as a public health student that there was no childbirth education, there was no pregnancy education for any of the women that she was meeting in the prison system.

And so she wrote a curriculum and that curriculum and the class, the women inside the class named that class Motherhood Beyond Bars.

It can feel like a clunky name and people often get it wrong.

And I've thought about all different sorts of things we could name this organization.

And at the end of the day, I come back to the fact that women sitting in a class, pregnant, looking at a lens through the rest of their life, wanted to look beyond this moment and were also really committed to their role as a mother.

So Motherhood Beyond Bars it is because that's the name that was given to this class.

And as I was working on the legislation looking for anyone that had any contact with these women, I found an article written in a newspaper, local newspaper about this childbirth class.

And I reached out to Bethany and I took her to lunch and I said, "We're working on this legislation."

And she said, "Oh good. I'm moving to Boston in a couple of months and I'm pretty sure the whole thing will fall apart because it's just ... I graduated from Rollins. I have a job.

"I just keep going in and teaching the class and there's a postpartum support group."

And I took a bite of my salad and I said, "Well, can I use that name Motherhood Beyond Bars?"

And she said, "Sure." And that is the day I became the unpaid executive director of a nonprofit I had not formed yet. Just with a simple question like, "Hey, can I use that name?"

And so I left that lunch with Bethany knowing and feeling convinced that I was ...

Again, it was a calling moment. It got plopped in my lap and over and over again.

I talk about Motherhood Beyond Bars magic a lot.

There are discrete moments in time that I know that there was something at work that wasn't my brain or necessarily my heart that wants this work to continue because it shouldn't.

There's no reason. It's hard, it's terrible.

Sometimes the adversaries that you come up against make it difficult and yet here we are.

And in that moment, that was one of the turning moments and I said, "Well, I guess I'm going to start a nonprofit."

I hadn't really intended to do that and I've got a name and I gave myself a fancy title. Executive director.

That sounded good, and I started building the program that Bethany had started and that meant that I went into prison.

I got my volunteer badge from the Department of Corrections, and I walked into my first postpartum support group at Lee Arrendale State Prison, which is the largest women's prison in the state.

And they opened up a door and I walked in and a few minutes later, 15 women were sitting around me and we looked at each other and said, "What now?"

And what now has turned into a non-profit that is statewide at this moment supports 280 infants, 800 family members.

We have two published research studies in peer-reviewed journals.

We're expanding our work into jails. I'm hiring six people in the next few months.

What now turned out to be quite a journey.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. So Amy, just again for our listeners, the interesting thing, there's so much wrapped up just into that last sentence.

So this, as you develop this extends beyond the incarcerated woman and beyond the pregnancy.

And it seems like the beyond part is a really important descriptor in the name of the organization.

Can you explain that a little?

AMY ARD: Yeah. A lot of what we have done with this organization has come from very careful listening to the women that are experiencing pregnancy and incarceration.

And so when we sat in that childbirth in that postpartum support group and listened to the women, there are a couple of things that they always needed help, they always asked us to help them with.

And the first was to help the person that was taking care of their baby.

I think most people think that babies who are born to someone who's incarcerated go into foster care.

And that is not true. About 97% of the babies who are born are picked up by a family member or a friend at the hospital and they assume caregiving responsibilities for that child.

And this is-

FRANK BLAKE: I'm sorry. Again, an area I don't begin to understand.

Is the baby picked up within days of birth?

AMY ARD: Within days of birth.

FRANK BLAKE: Couple of weeks after birth? No. It's days. Wow.

AMY ARD: It's days. And I can describe that process a little more, but I will say that the two things that they asked for, help the person that's taking care of my baby and help me reunite with my family when I get out of here.

And the complicating factor for us was that if you are an in-person volunteer inside the prisons, you are not allowed to have contact with family members of that person.

So when these women were saying, "My mom is really struggling to feed the baby, to diaper the baby. I'm not sure that she can take care of them.

"She's passed the baby on to somebody else that may be able to take care of them."

I was hearing these stories that were really troubling of babies changing hands a lot.

So someone who came to pick up the baby at the hospital may recognize that they had to be at work the next day, and so they brought someone else with them to the hospital and handed the baby to that person in the parking lot.

We had people who handed babies off to complete strangers. An overwhelmed caregiver.

And at some point I realized after listening to the mothers for a year and a half, that I knew more about where these infants were than anyone else in the state because I was listening to the mothers.

DFACS did not know where these ... And DFACS-

FRANK BLAKE: I'm sorry. Who's DFACS?

AMY ARD: It's our child welfare agency for Georgia.

We call Division of Family and Children's Services and that's who runs foster care.

And I went to talk to the head of DFACS at that point and they said, "Yep. We don't have a case manager assigned to these families."

It would be like if you knew that you had an assignment in another country for a year and you had young children and you might ask a family member or friend to step in and take care of your child while you were gone for a year, you would not expect the child welfare agency to get involved in that arrangement.

That's very, very similar to the people who are incarcerated.

But what that meant was that there was a huge gap in services and the safety net for those kids.

And I started to hear stories of babies being left with a 17-year-old babysitter for a week.

And the women asking for our help in supporting their babies.

And so at the end of 2019 when it also became clear that the Department of Corrections wasn't a real big fan of me personally ...

I think because of my advocacy work for this population.

We made the decision in conjunction with the women that we were serving not to go into the prisons in person.

And when we made that decision, we told them we are still going to be supporting you in all of the important ways that we can.

We will not be sitting here in this classroom on Friday mornings.

But now that releases our…the lift on being able to talk to family members.

So that was at the end of 2019. What we didn't know at that point was that soon the world was going to be shut down anyway.

We would not have-

FRANK BLAKE: Good timing in a way.

AMY ARD: Again, when I talk about kind of the magical timeline of things.

I don't think that COVID was magic, but I do think that we got a head start on planning what our programs would look like if we weren't physically walking into prisons.

And so we started talking to the hospital where all of these babies were born saying, "Tell us about the experience of calling these caregivers and telling them to come pick up a baby."

And they told me, "We will make that phone call. We will tell someone there is a baby to pick up and they don't know what we're talking about.

"They didn't know they were going to be a caregiver. And we give them four hours to arrive here with a car seat and we make them watch a couple of videos on infant safety and then we send them home."

And that lined up really well with what the women inside prison were telling me.

That sometimes they didn't have any money on their calling account to call the caregiver that they wanted to come pick up the baby so they weren't able to communicate with them.

Every form of communication from prison costs money.

And so if you don't have money, you can't make phone calls, you can't write a letter.

Every email costs money. It costs money to send a single email.

And so again, what the women were telling me is that I don't even know where my baby is. I don't know if anyone came to pick up the baby.

I put my mom's name down, I don't know if she got there.

And then the hospital reiterating the story.

We call and they don't know, suggested there was a pretty big gap to fill in this area and we were uniquely designed to fill that gap.

And so we launched our infant and caregiver support program. That's what we called it in 2020.

And in our first month, five babies were born.

And at this point I say we, and it is a very royal we. It was me. It was me.

And I realized that first month when five babies were born, I was in deep trouble because our work up to that point had involved me driving into a prison and providing a service, a childbirth class and coming back and doing some advocacy work and then repeating that next week.

And now I had five babies who I-

FRANK BLAKE: It's like a caseworker.

AMY ARD: I was a caseworker.

And I had made an important promise to those families.

I said, "You'll never buy a pack of diapers. So call me and I will send you diapers every single month to your doorstep and we will make sure that you have a safe place for the baby to sleep and we will get you formula if you need it."

And so the gas stipend that I was paying myself to drive to prisons suddenly turned into a pretty expensive program just for five babies.

And I quickly realized I needed some help and I hired my first staff person in April or May of 2020.

And I made a decision to hire someone that had experienced this herself.

So a formerly incarcerated woman who had come home from prison after eight years just that January.

And she quickly taught me more than any course I could have taken.

I had never run a nonprofit before. I didn't know what I was doing.

And together we started to build a program that supports not just moms, not just caregivers, not just infants, but the entire family.

And so what was our infant and caregiver support program turned into holistic family support.

And we had five babies in the beginning of 2020 and we have 280 today in 2025.

FRANK BLAKE: How long does the support go for?

AMY ARD: We haven't kicked anyone out.

FRANK BLAKE: Okay.

AMY ARD: We understand that these families' needs can be cyclical and there are periods of time where they need more support than others.

And one of those periods of time is around the birth of the baby. So supporting mom in that period of time and also supporting caregivers.

We now can get in touch.

The mothers tell us who they have identified as the caregiver, and we can reach out to that person well before the baby is born so we can make sure they have a car seat.

We can make sure they have a safe place for the child to sleep when they bring him or her home.

We can do a lot of that support even before the baby is born because we want the baby to be safe from the minute they leave the hospital.

That is our non-negotiable. We want to make sure that everything they need to keep an infant safe is in place.

And then there are other periods of time where the family needs us to lean in a little more heavily and that's often around the time that the mom is coming out of prison and back to her family.

And we may have a caregiver who feels very bonded to a child, but also wants the mom to be an important caregiver.

And figuring out how that family molds from caregiver baby to caregiver mom and baby is a period where we need to lean in and facilitate relationships.

And reentry is hard. Reentry is especially hard for women.

There are a lot of programs in this country that provide support for men coming home from prison.

You can't retrofit programs like that for women who have very young children.

And so we are designing these reentry programs specifically for women who have young children.

FRANK BLAKE: So Amy, is there something that you see with the children, the family, the mother?

What are some of the things you see that make you go, wow, I am thrilled that I'm getting up every morning to work on this?

AMY ARD: There are a million individual stories and every single one of the stories of our success stories have reshaped the direction of our organization.

So I'll tell you one as a way of describing that success story.

I met a woman named Danielle in our first postpartum support class. The first time I walked into prison, she was one of the women in that class.

She had delivered a baby, had a hard time finding someone to take the baby, but the paternal grandmother said, "I will."

And she didn't have a particularly great relationship with the paternal grandmother, but she was so grateful that her child would not go into foster care.

So that is a theme throughout all of our work is that there is a real desire to keep the kid out of foster care.

So paternal grandmother said she would take care of the baby and Danielle finished her sentence and came home.

I remember the time of year she came home because I drove to Monroe County, Georgia, and dropped off Christmas presents for Danielle to give her baby.

And I remember talking to her on the 26th of December and asked her how did Christmas go with the baby.

And she said, "I didn't get to see her."

The mother-in-law would not let her see her baby, who was I think two at this time. And she was heartbroken.

And then a few months later I got a call from Danielle. She was very agitated.

She said, "I've got a court hearing coming up and I think she's going to try to take my baby."

And she called me after court.

I remember exactly where I was standing and she said, "They terminated my parental rights and she won't even let me have visitation."

And Danielle had been working really hard on stabilizing. She had been in drug treatment.

She, I thought, was really on the right road. And that was the day that all of it stopped.

She didn't have a reason to keep going. And so she fell back into pretty dangerous drug use.

And as a result of shoplifting charge, one of the next times I heard from her was from Monroe County Jail and she had been shoplifting to support a drug habit.

And she called and in that moment I recognized we are repeating a cycle because she shared with me she was also pregnant at that moment.

And I knew that she had been in and out of prisons and jails for a large portion of her adult life and that it hadn't worked.

She had never received treatment in jail or prison that had changed the course of her life.

And so I said, "We're going to try something different this time."

And I worked with her public defender and I found a treatment program for her in Augusta, Georgia called Hope House.

And the public defender worked with the prosecuting attorney and I appeared in court and we presented an option to a judge that said, "Let's try something different this time. Let's send her to treatment."

And the judge said yes. The judge who had seen her before and knew her story, knew that prison had not been a healing place for her, but it was a last opportunity.

If I see you again, if you do not complete this drug treatment program, if you are not successful, you will go to prison.

And so Danielle went to Hope House in Augusta.

And the next time I heard from her there was a picture of her doing prenatal yoga on a sunlit green.

And she was talking about the joy of having her own space.

She had her own little apartment and she was getting prenatal appointments and she was so excited.

And she gave birth to a beautiful little baby girl on October 31st and then came back to Hope House with her baby in her arms and completed her treatment program and graduated.

And this particular treatment program had a housing program so she could start work and for six months her housing would be covered.

And her partner went to a drug treatment program and graduated from it successfully.

And then they lived together with their baby and had a second child together.

This was two and a half years ago.

And in December I hired her to be a program coordinator and to go back and to find others who were in the dark place that she was and help them find the light to the other side.

That is what is possible.

It was Danielle's story that I think told us if we can find women before they stand in front of a judge and we can offer an alternative.

The judges are hungry for this. The judges know that our carceral system is not a place for healing.

They have few options. And unless someone approaches them and says, "We've done all this work. All you have to do is say, let's try something different."

We have a hundred percent success rate at this point of judges taking that opportunity for people that they know are not dangerous.

These are not people who are a threat to those of us walking around.

They have they have opioid use disorders, they have substance use disorders, they have untreated mental health conditions.

And if we can send these women to a place of healing, not just for them but for their children as well, we can change the course of these families' lives for generations.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

Amy, does the state or the locality now support you in some of these or is this still pretty much you have to do this with philanthropic dollars and volunteers?

AMY ARD: We have in the last year and a half some really wonderful partners on the state level.

So the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. It's a big agency name. We call it DBHDD. Has funding for what are called certified peer specialists.

And these are people who have been through addictive disease, mental health, forensic peer mentors who are formerly incarcerated.

And there's an application process and a training that you ...

It's a pretty competitive process to be accepted into a training program.

And then you're a certified peer specialist.

And places like hospitals and treatment centers have recognized the real efficacy of working with peers.

And so they're actually a pretty hot commodity right now.

They are not enough of them for the jobs that we have.

They're not particularly well-paying jobs and we're working on that. But they have had funding for certified peer specialists and that has been funneled to Motherhood Beyond Bars.

So I have four staff positions for certified peer specialists that are funded through DBHDD.

It does start at the federal government.

So we're in a fraught period of time that we're unsure if that money will be extended into the future.

And this year, actually, I had a staff person, her first day was yesterday that is funded by the Georgia Opioid Abatement Trust.

So the money that is flowing into states after the huge settlement with the opioid manufacturers, this is the first round of funding that has come through Georgia.

And we were very lucky to be selected as a site for some of that funding investment.

And that is actually working to expand our jail program.

And so we are providing services at Fulton County Jail and Cobb County Jail now. The partnership is amazing. They want us to be there. They value what we're doing.

They see the effects of the program inside their own facility.

And our work now is to expand into other jails across the state where we know the opioid use disorder and pregnancy is a lethal combination.

And finding people in jails, providing them opioid use, opioid disorder education, childbirth support, and then they're enrolled in our holistic family support program when they come out.

So we stay in touch with these women as well.

FRANK BLAKE: Where do you think Motherhood Beyond Bars will be five years from now?

AMY ARD: Everyone that runs a nonprofit should say, I hope we don't exist.

I would only hope we don't exist if there's not a need for our services.

FRANK BLAKE: Assume there's the need.

AMY ARD: There's a need. So everyone who works in a non-profit should be working to put themselves out of business.

I don't see the trajectory. We are continuing to lock up pregnant women.

There was a dip during the COVID crisis where we just didn't incarcerate as many people. That's reversed now.

What I would like to do over the next five years is focus our work on the jail level.

So find those women before they stand in front of a judge and offer the judges an alternative and work with our partners in treatment programs and community-based treatment throughout the state so that we can prevent the imprisonment and eventual separation of mom and baby.

There will be some women that that's not an appropriate course of action for.

There'll be some women who just aren't there in their lives and it's not safe for them or the baby or society.

But the vast majority of women that we work with have a substance use disorder that's untreated. And they're not getting help in prison.

And what happens when you separate a mom from a baby at birth is you create the very first ...

Well, actually probably the second adverse childhood experience, an ACE, that that child experiences.

And your wife is one of the experts on this.

We know that if young children experience a number of adverse childhood experiences in their early years, that it affects them for the rest of their life, not just mental health, but physical health.

And one adverse childhood experience is the imprisonment of a close family member.

So all of the babies in our program have that check checked off on their list.

And then to separate a baby from their primary caregiver at birth is an ACE.

And what we know is that these infants, because of the lack of support for the caregiver, they're actually changing primary caregivers multiple times in the first year of life.

And if we can avoid that initial separation, we will prevent at least two ACEs from happening within the first year of life.

I do not have a money tree in my backyard that allows us to solve every single problem for every single family that we work with.

Many of these are many generations of untreated mental health and untreated substance use disorders.

But there are a few problems that we can solve even without a lot of money, and that's where we're going to lean in.

FRANK BLAKE: So I ask this of everyone who appears on the podcast, so I'll ask you. Amy, who in your life has done a crazy good turn for you?

AMY ARD: Well, I am sitting right now in my childhood bedroom and I've redecorated. In this house that I was born in, I lived with my mom and dad.

My mom and dad were both social workers.

My dad actually worked for the Department of Juvenile Justice. He was hired to run an outdoor education program for them.

And then my mom was a social worker and became a teacher.

And when I called my mom and said, "I think we want to move back to Atlanta and in order for us to do what I think we want to do, I need some pretty cheap rent."

And she jumped up and down and said yes. There was not a moment of hesitation.

I had three children at this point. Very young. And none of this work would be possible, none of my husband's work ...

He's the executive director of Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, working with foster children and getting school supports.

None of this would work if we didn't have this safe landing space. And here we are. It's a crazy good turn. Not everyone is in the position.

Now there are smaller acts of kindness that happen every single day and things show up on my doorstep.

I have friends that support this work by when they know that we are going through a particularly hard time with some clients, a bottle of wine will appear or a bag of my favorite chips.

And I will tell you, it is the small acts of kindness that add up that actually keep me going.

And also remind me that what I consider to be small acts of kindness for the families that we work with matter a lot.

FRANK BLAKE: And for our listeners, where would you suggest that they go?

Just speaking for myself, this is not a problem that occurs to most people.

As soon as you hear it, you say, "Oh, whoa."

But it's not something that is foremost in most people's ...

So where should our listeners turn to learn more about the problem of motherhood.

Not just your organization, Motherhood Beyond Bars, but the problem more generally. If there is-

AMY ARD: A good place to start, is our website where we offer a lot of just basic statistics about the number of people who are touched by this issue, the impacts of incarceration on infants.

And I mentioned that when we circle back to Motherhood Beyond Bar's magic, Bethany Kotler who started this program's work, she just got her PhD at Harvard School of Public Health.

Her dissertation was this work. And as a result, we have the first of its kind research in the world on the impacts of incarceration on infants and the effects on the broader family.

So we have now two published research studies that you can find that will lead you into a rabbit hole of other studies.

So if you follow that research, it's a good way to learn a lot more.

On our Instagram and our Facebook not only do we post the cutest baby pictures most Fridays, you get to see some of the families that we work with always with their permission to publish their stories and their pictures.

But we also post action alerts and news articles that we think are of interest.

So following us there is a good way to get some of the most recent background and research and also a lot of feel-good stories from the families we work with.

FRANK BLAKE: Are there other organizations like yours in other states around the country?

Is there a network of folks like yourself?

AMY ARD: I don't like recreating wheels. If there's work out there that we can replicate, I am very interested in doing that.

And so when I moved to Georgia and thought I am going to be a doula for women in prison, there were several organizations that had been doing this work ahead of Georgia and one is called the Ostara Initiative.

And it's Minnesota Prison Doula and Alabama Prison Doula Project.

And there's been a documentary on PBS called Tutwiler, which I recommend people watch. It covers the work in Alabama.

And so there was a national network of childbirth professionals and doulas working in prisons.

When it became clear that we were going to be moving to holistic family support and really supporting the whole family, I looked for organizations that were doing that work.

And there are organizations even in Georgia, organizations like Forever Family that support children who have an incarcerated parent.

But I could not find any and maybe as a result of this podcast, I'll hear from some who were really prior to the moment of birth, engaging with that family and from the moment the baby left the hospital leaning in.

And so I think-

FRANK BLAKE: That continuity. Yeah.

AMY ARD: I think that's our innovation, I think in the space is to provide that support.

And then we don't have an end. So women that we were working with six years ago may pop up five years later and have a moment of crisis and need some support.

We don't graduate people out of our program. We're really happy when the babies get potty-trained.

We spent $50,000 on diapers this year, keeping our promise to these families that they will not buy a pack of diapers.

And that is one of our solvable problems for these families.

We know that diapers are one of the reasons these children get handed over to foster care because the caregivers get overwhelmed by the cost of diapering a child.

So we provide the dignity of diapers for these families and then we celebrate when the babies get potty-trained.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, what you do, it's truly inspirational and such a crazy good turn and such a leap into the unknown that you and your family did.

It's great to share your success and then think of the increasingly greater things that you and your organization can do. So Amy, thank you very much.

AMY ARD: It was a joy to talk to you. I really appreciate it.