Giving Austin Labor Support is an organization of dedicated volunteers who provide emotional, physical and informational birth support to those who are alone or under-supported during this important life transition.

GALS volunteers provide an average of 10 hours of support per birth in hospitals, birth centers and homes. In 40 percent of those births, the volunteer meets the birthing person for the first time while they are in labor. Last year, one in three moms would have been alone in birth without GALS.

While we believe Austin is pretty awesome, we know that we have a long way to go in the fight for racial equity in birth. GALS clients and volunteers come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but the majority of the volunteers are white, while only half of the families we work with identify as such.

A $1000 grant from the Austin Awesome Foundation will go toward providing GALS' 70+ volunteers, coordinators and board members with ongoing implicit bias training to better understand both their own biases and the structural racism that affects birth outcomes. This project will give more Austinites the foundation in which to begin noticing and understanding bias in everyday encounters, as well as in the birth room, and will go deeper in undoing racism individually and structurally.