UMass Boston

UMass Boston Early Childhood PhD candidate Stephanie Crawford has been named a 2023 Extraordinary Woman by the City of Boston and a 2023 Commonwealth Heroine by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for her work in community and family services, advocacy, and support post pregnancy baby loss. 

With the help of a close friend, Crawford founded the nonprofit Propa City Community Outreach in 2011 to support mothers who experienced pregnancy and infant loss.  

“My son was stillborn in February 2011, and this was my way of healing and trying to support someone else and help soften the blow because I had experienced such a big blow,” she said.  

Crawford’s nonprofit initially focused on providing support to parents one-on-one but she soon realized community members needed the space and resources to talk about their mental health and address topics that were still considered taboo in her community such as pregnancy loss and grief.  

The outreach program provides education, public awareness, and support in processing healing in positive ways, including resources for youths to advocate for their own healing journey, sessions to help discover various healing modalities, and further support for families and individuals that have suffered baby loss.  

In 2011, Crawford was also taking a class at UMass Boston when her professor encouraged her to pursue the Post Master’s Certificate in Early Education and Teaching. While being accepted into the program, she learned she was pregnant for a second time following her previous loss, and was hesitant to move forward. After a positive conversation with the program director, Crawford decided to enroll in 2020. She said she felt supported during her entire time in the program while she was pregnant and even brought her son to class when he was a toddler.  

Currently, Crawford is in her second year of her PhD program at UMass Boston while working as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools system and has found similarities between her nonprofit work and her work as a kindergarten teacher. Her experiences have highlighted the importance of not isolating individuals in order to force them to figure out their own emotions but rather address their concerns as a community.  

“When one person is not healed, it definitely affects the community,” she said. “Find ways to help them and address what they’re lacking in and fill them up with what they need because that affects the classroom, or the world, in a positive way.”  

Crawford explains that it’s also important to give children more credit that they do know themselves and provide them the space to identify their emotions and express how they may want to deal with them. 

“We give them the feelings, then we tell them what to do with those feelings, then we tell them how much time they have to do it, and then we tell them to get back to doing what we want them to do,” she said. “I think that one of the most important things is allowing young children to have autonomy.” 

Through Belle Joie Doula & Family services, Crawford also offers doula services and education for families with children up to 5 years of age with and without special needs to learn about effective child development practices. When Crawford completes her PhD program, she hopes to merge her worlds together and dig deeper into what can be done to support whole families, enhancing her work as an educator and supporting family engagement in Boston Public Schools. 

Crawford said her work is inspired by her need to honor her son; her work being recognized feels like she has been able to turn her pain into purpose. 

“When you experience loss, sometimes one of your biggest fears is that you’re going to forget your child because they’re not here and you can’t make those memories,” she said. “Whenever my work is being recognized, it reminds me that God put me here for a reason, and it feels like I’ve honored my child and there’s a purpose to my story.”