What a maternal wellness organization in Denver and Atlanta learned about where the dollars go furthest, and what it is asking of the people who already give.
Mahogany Mothers Circle got it wrong first. Marpessa Allen spent years fighting to get doulas paid a fair wage, and early on the organization paid for doula services broadly. “It helped, but the dollars spread thin,” she says. The best results came when it paid doulas for their specific expertise in postpartum support: Acudetox, sound baths, massage therapy. Then she noticed something else. Many of the mothers who loved the programs had talents of their own, so the organization started paying them to lead. That shift is how the Mahogany Moms Run Club and Yoga Daze were born.
“Support that pays mothers builds an economy. Support that only serves them runs out when the grant does.”
Marpessa Allen, Founder and Executive Director, Mahogany Mothers Circle
This year the organization is serving 95 mothers across Denver/Aurora and Atlanta, with a waitlist in Colorado of 70 families. The need it works against is on the public record. In 2023 the maternal mortality rate for Black women in the United States was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, against 14.5 for white women, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Marpessa’s own donor one-pager puts the cause plainly: Black mothers face disproportionately high rates of maternal illness and death, “driven by fragmented care, bias, and underinvestment in the community providers families trust most.”
Marpessa is the founder and executive director of Mahogany Mothers Circle, a maternal wellness and economic empowerment organization that started online during COVID and, as she puts it, “grew into something you can walk into.” A mother might find it through a run, a yoga class, a garden workshop at Natural Grocers, a strength or boxing session, or postpartum support from one of the expert doulas it contracts in both cities. “What she feels is that nobody is doing her a favor,” Marpessa says. “She’s among women who look like her, she’s being invested in, and if she has a gift, there’s a path for her to get paid for it.”
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What a mother walks into
“They treat mothers as recipients instead of experts,” Marpessa says of most efforts to support mothers. The programs are built the other way round. The Mahogany Moms Run Club and Yoga Daze are led by Mahogany Mothers Circle moms who are paid for their talents. The Superfood Series runs at Natural Grocers, alongside strength training and boxing. A fitness and nutrition app is in development with mHealth Anschutz at CU Anschutz. In Atlanta, the one-pager describes Building Her Village, a chapter program of paid peer leaders, family outings, grocery outings and canning classes, with $10,000 named as the figure that launches it.
The postpartum side is the Mahogany Mothers Circle Fund, which contracts expert doulas for one-on-one and group support in both cities. Marpessa’s own profile lists the next priorities as expanding the Atlanta chapter and embedding trauma-informed care into facilitator training.
The organization is fiscally sponsored by the Social Good Fund as it builds toward independent 501(c)(3) status. Its partners, in Marpessa’s words, “include the Colorado Health Foundation, Black Resilience in Colorado Fund, the Mothr Foundation, Kindrest, and now The Race Half Marathon & 5k, where we’re an official charitable partner.” The one-pager dates the Colorado Health Foundation relationship from 2025 to 2028. How she came to build it starts somewhere other than a nonprofit.
From the newsroom to the birth room
Marpessa’s background, as she lists it on her profile, spans broadcast journalism (News Director, WHBC 96.3, Howard University), personal training, and, currently, an Evening MBA at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. She holds a B.A. in Communication Studies, Broadcast Journalism, from the University of Colorado Denver. She has been a community doula for the last seven years, and from 2018 she did family advocacy consulting with C3 Consulting, whose mission she describes as elevating the voices of Black families in healthcare, education and civic engagement. KUSA in Denver featured her as a doula addressing racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality. In 2019 and 2020 she was a political associate on the Hickenlooper 2020 campaign.
Mahogany Mothers Circle began in August 2020 as an online program during the pandemic. The following year she was at the Colorado Capitol. “It’s still surreal to look back on 2021 and remember that I helped push Colorado’s Birth Equity Bill Package across the finish line while I was less than two years postpartum,” she wrote in a recent post. She describes the package as Colorado’s own Momnibus, the state’s first-ever maternity care bill package: three bills covering extended Medicaid coverage through the first year postpartum, better standards of care for incarcerated birthing people, a modernized grievance process, and protection against being coerced into unnecessary cesareans. She stood alongside legislators and organizers and doulas, and brought, in her words, “policy, family advocacy, and birth work, shaped by my life as a doula.”
“I was doing this work while I was still deep in my own postpartum season, sleep-deprived and rebuilding, and somehow that made the work feel more urgent, not less. I wasn’t advocating from a distance. I was living the exact reality this legislation was written to protect.”
Marpessa, Founder and Executive Director, Mahogany Mothers Circle
“It’s proof that mothering and building world-changing work were never in competition,” she wrote. “They were always the same act.” That belief has a name on her profile, Executive Motherhood, which she describes as the framework Mahogany Mothers Circle is built around: “the belief that mothering is a legitimate enterprise deserving real infrastructure, investment, and support.” The way she thinks about funding, though, was learned earlier and closer to home.
Her father’s donors
Asked who shaped her, Marpessa names her father. “He raised support for Inner City Health Center for years, and I watched a small circle of donors keep that work alive by showing up every single year,” she says. “That’s how I think about fundraising: relationships, not transactions.”
It is the picture she returns to when she describes the supporter she is looking for now. “I grew up watching my father sustain his work at Inner City Health Center because a small group of people committed year after year. That’s the kind of supporter I’m looking for.”
The lesson has a cost attached, and she states it without softening. “Grants open the door, but they don’t keep the lights on year after year. People do. I wish I had started building individual donor relationships on day one instead of year three.” The clearest evidence that people will show up came this October, in a city where the organization is still new.
198 registered, 100 showed up
The Community Baby Shower is no longer a plan. During The Race’s Community Impact Service Day, Mahogany Mothers Circle hosted the Mahogany Moms Baby Shower at The Pink Zebra Social in Atlanta with the Mothr Foundation, the Kindrest app, and Because I Can Runners. “198 people registered and 100 showed up,” Marpessa says. “For a first event in a newer city, that told me Atlanta mothers were ready for us.” The one-pager counts 43 Atlanta moms on the waiting list.
It happened inside something much bigger. By her account, this year’s Race brought together more than 3,100 registered runners from 37 states, Washington, D.C., and international and military locations. Seventy percent were women, and the average age was 47. More than 180 runners gave their time across 10 service projects, and the Charitable Impact Fund raised over $28,000. “Being an official Impact charitable partner put Mahogany Mothers Circle in front of exactly the people who care about Black women’s health and are willing to show up for it,” she says.
The Mahogany Moms Run Club, she says, is still in the early stages, “but there is a real need.” What is real, in her words, is the model: “mothers leading, partners showing up, and runners turning miles into support.” Holding that model together across two cities is the part of the job she did not expect.
Infrastructure before the second city
“Mothers come for the program but stay for the ownership,” Marpessa says. “When I started, I thought my job was to design great programming. Now I know my job is to build infrastructure: paid leadership roles, goal tracking across funding, programming, marketing, education, and team development. That’s what let us grow from one city to two without losing what made it work.”
Her profile describes the same work from the operating side: leading strategy, funding and operations across both chapters, from securing foundation and donor support to building the automation systems and training programs that let the team scale. The organization projects 30 percent growth next year. The question she is putting to funders is what pays for it.
Where Marpessa Is Now
The goal for next year is $325,000, and Marpessa is deliberately shifting Mahogany Mothers Circle from mostly grant funding toward long-term individual donors. She wants this piece to reach “the people who already give but haven’t found us yet: individual donors, family foundations, and anyone holding money in a Donor Advised Fund who is looking for somewhere it can do real work.” For a DAF holder, she says, “a grant recommendation designated for Mahogany Mothers Circle fiscally sponsored by Social Good Fund, is one of the simplest ways to become that person.” The one-pager sets out the scale: $200 funds a paid peer leader stipend for a Mahogany Mothers Circle mom, $10,000 launches Building Her Village in Atlanta, and $325,000 fully funds next year’s programming across both chapters. “Mothers and partners will find us through the work,” she says. “Funders need to find us through stories like this one.”
Outside the organization she is studying for her Evening MBA at Emory, and she is learning how to play golf. “The gym is a requirement,” she says. The hard moment she offers is about running:“I haven’t been able to run for a few months. I had tendonitis and it was not at a convenient time. It caused me to remain in gratitude for aging and slowing down.”
Her closing line is the ask, and she wrote it herself.
“100 mothers came to our first Atlanta baby shower. With $325,000 we can do that all year in two cities, and if you give through a Donor Advised Fund, a grant recommendation for Mahogany Mothers Circle puts that money to work now.”
The Marpessa Allen Playbook: Building something mothers own
- Pay mothers for the talents they already have. The Run Club and Yoga Daze exist because mothers who loved the programs were paid to lead them.
- Pay for specific expertise, not services broadly. Doula dollars spread thin until they went to Acudetox, sound baths and massage therapy.
- Build the infrastructure before the second city. Paid leadership roles and goal tracking are what let one city become two.
- Start the individual donor relationships on day one. Not year three. Grants open the door, people keep the lights on.
- Treat fundraising as relationships, not transactions. A small circle of donors who show up every year is the model, learned from her father.
From the Diary of Marpessa Allen
Marpessa Allen is a Denver, Colorado-based maternal wellness founder and the Founder and Executive Director of Mahogany Mothers Circle.
| Role | Founder and Executive Director, Mahogany Mothers Circle. Creator of Executive Motherhood® |
| Based in | Denver, Colorado |
| Previously with | C3 Consulting (2018 to 2026), African Chamber of Commerce Colorado (2025 to 2026) |
“Sculpting Wellness. Empowering Mothers.”
Editor’s note
Executives Diary features Marpessa Allen for the decision inside her answers: an organization that stopped paying for services broadly and started paying mothers and doulas for what they specifically know. The numbers she gives are her own and are small enough to check, 95 mothers, a 70-family waitlist, 100 at a first Atlanta event, and she states the funding problem in the same plain terms, grants open the door and people keep the lights on. The piece is written for the donors and DAF holders she says she is looking for. The editors found the case made by her account of the work, not by a mission statement.
Executives Diary, Editorial
