“I doula democracy.” Cassy Jones-McBryde has a way of making you rethink what care looks like, whether she’s helping someone through an abortion or bringing people together to shape policy. She still lives in the Southwest Detroit house where she grew up, where her mother grew peaches and pears, fed whole families, and taught her what it meant to show up. “My mother used to take me to the polls on her hip,” she recalls, tracing that lesson back to the great-grandfather she remembers as the first Black person to vote in his Alabama county. Cassy carries that family history into her work at Planned Parenthood and into the chamber she founded to keep Black voices at the center of reproductive justice. She tells these stories with the same candor she brings to the summer she found out what happened to her favorite goat. Listen for how the care she grew up with shapes whose stories get preserved and who gets a say in the policies that affect their families.
