A Legacy of Leadership and Community-Building in Alberta’s Birth Services
The path to formal recognition for midwifery in Alberta was a protracted and difficult one. For generations, before 1998, dedicated pioneer midwives practiced vital, culturally significant work without provincial registration. These courageous practitioners often had to endure legal battles to defend their right to practice, and even after successful defenses, the mainstream health system denied them hospital privileges, sidelining their legitimacy.
It wasn’t until 1998 that the Province of Alberta finally acknowledged the profession, yet it remained without public funding. Undeterred, the growing community of midwives began to organize. A key early success was the collaboration with Alberta Health Services to pilot a birth centre within the Westview Health Centre in Stony Plain. The Westside Midwives, an active group based in Spruce Grove, championed the use of this new centre, quickly demonstrating the undeniable public appetite for midwifery services.
Evolution and Advocacy
The landscape shifted in 2011 when Westview Health Centre closed its maternity services on September 1st. Already anticipating this loss, the Westside Midwives took a bold step: they secured a site in West Edmonton and developed the Lucina Birth Centre. This seamless transition ensured that mothers-to-be who had planned for a Westview birth could instead be accommodated at the new Lucina facility.
The group subsequently rebranded as the Lucina Midwives. Today, they remain a foundational provider of midwife services, operating from the Lucina Centre and offering home and hospital births across the greater Edmonton area. This period of transition also saw fierce advocacy from the Association for Safe Alternative Childbirth (ASAC). They worked tirelessly to lobby the provincial government for public funding for midwifery care, ensuring that financial barriers would not prevent women from accessing this essential service. Despite a challenging, often chaotic, licensing and governmental process, the midwives successfully guided the province toward implementing a sustainable, funded model for care.
In 2011, the Westside Midwives became the Lucina Midwives and opened the Lucina Centre, pictured here
A 2009 article in Birth Issues detailing the history of midwifery advocacy in Alberta
The Profound Impact of Midwifery
The expansion of professional midwifery yields significant advantages that reach far beyond personal preference. At the institutional level, it measurably reduces complications in childbirth. Numerous studies confirm that midwives decrease rates of medical interventions such as cesarean sections, labor induction, and episiotomies, while also lowering the risk of preterm birth and infant mortality. This translates to substantial cost savings for the broader medical system and physician services.
More personally, midwives and doulas serve as powerful advocates for women, reversing the medical system’s tendency to treat pregnancy as a pathology. By providing safe, personalized guidance, they help women connect with their inherent capacity to give birth. This informed, empowering approach ensures that mothers are proactive in their decisions and not caught off guard by the need for anesthesia, induction, or surgery, allowing them to retain their personal agency within the hospital environment.
I really love out-of-hospital births. Home birth and birth centre birth gives us more freedom and allows the women to feel that they are in a really warm, welcoming, safe space.
Carly Beaulieu, Practice Lead, Lucina Midwives
Cowork Provides a Local Hub
The demand for the Lucina Centre quickly outpaced its original capacity. By 2022, the midwives had facilitated over 3,000 births at the centre, alongside thousands more at home and in hospitals. To better serve their eastern Edmonton clientele and expand their clinic services for mothers and newborns, Lucina established a satellite location at Sparrow Cowork’s Gibbard Block in February 2022. This move did more than just expand their reach; Lucina’s presence attracted a small ecosystem of complementary wellness professionals—including a chiropractor and massage therapists—creating a centralized hub of support for pregnant women and young families within the Gibbard Block community.
Cultivating Leaders of Leaders
The Lucina Midwives’ influence is deeply valued by Sparrow Capital, despite their modest physical footprint in the coworking network. Their narrative is seen as a powerful demonstration of leadership: they empower women through childbirth, mentor the next generation of midwives and doulas, and historically led the charge for crucial provincial legislative change.
“Sparrow Capital seeks to support business leaders, but more than that to support leaders who are able to coordinate other groups of leaders. The leadership is the thing that is scarce. Even scarcer are the people in the community who have already, of their own initiative, taken it upon themselves to coordinate other leaders, providing a layer of meta-leadership that is intangible and extremely valuable.”
— Antoine Palmer, Sparrow Capital Co-founder
The Lucina Midwives are viewed as the quintessential embodiment of this “meta-leadership” principle. They are the rare entrepreneurs who coordinate other leaders and inspire an entire community. Sparrow Capital believes that supporting this kind of deep-rooted, community-focused leadership is paramount. Birth itself is a foundational, human, and meta-organizing principle of all life. Therefore, supporting mothers, healthy families, and the transition between generations is essential to nurturing the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem that Sparrow Capital aims to serve. Sparrow Capital proudly partners with Lucina Midwives, recognizing their substantial and robust contributions to Edmonton’s community well-being.