Sera

She’s helping women and babies in her home state—after traveling all over the world.

Sera Bonds, a trained midwife, used to manage multi-million-dollar grants for international agencies. But the more grants she managed in India and around the world, the more convinced she became — the international aid system, especially programs designed to empower women, needed an overhaul.

Again and again, Sera said she encountered programs for women that were designed by people with little knowledge of life for women in the communities where they intervened. As a result, programs were culturally inappropriate, Sera said. One poster campaign depicted AIDS as an evil entity without any context of how the disease was transmitted. No one seemed to be held responsible for lackluster results.

Sera turned her frustration into action. She founded her own nonprofit, Circle of Health International (COHI), in 2004.

COHI delivers high-quality care to women and children in crisis situations around the world from Oklahoma to Sierra Leone to the Philippines.

Houston, Texas is one of the newest additions to the list.

Sera lives nearby in Austin, and when she saw the devastation in Houston, her team sprung into action.

“It felt great to be doing something in our state,” Sera said.

At first, her team focused on immediate needs for women and their babies — breast pumps, diapers, and maternity clothes. The more shelters the COHI team visited, the more clearly they understood: Recovery needs were varied and struggling mothers would need long-term support. Needs were especially acute for immigrant mothers who Sera said were “tying their children together to their bodies at night,” out of fear of an immigration raid.

COHI rapidly adjusted its approach, hiring a team of evacuee women to coordinate their relief efforts within shelters in Austin and Houston and distributing cash grants to evacuees cover varied costs, including housing and transportation, labor and delivery support, and medical care for children with health issues.

“Our model is to create job opportunities through our programs,” Sera said.

With more resources, she’d like to hire more evacuee women and extend her programs to rural Texas, which “have not been well-tended,” she said.

Learn more about GlobalGiving’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, which is supporting this project.

This is a story from GlobalGiving’s “After the Storm” series.