A cocktail-attire gathering at Cheeni in downtown Durham is asking guests to sit with grief, joy and everything in between — all while raising money for a local nonprofit that helps mothers survive the earliest, hardest days of parenthood. Joy, Grief, & Motherhood: An Evening Benefitting Equity Before Birth will bring together people with personal experience of pregnancy loss, caregivers and others interested in maternal health for a night built around a curated tasting menu and conversation rather than a formal program.
According to Grieve Leave, the organization behind the event, the mix-and-mingle format is intentional: this is meant to feel like community, not a lecture, with “thoughtfully curated tasting menu, meaningful storytelling, and community connection” at its center. The gathering will take place at Cheeni, located at 202 N. Corcoran St., Suite 100, and organizers say it will create space for conversations spanning “the full spectrum of motherhood — including joy, grief, resilience, and hope,” per the same listing. As CBS17 reports, the evening is organized by Grieve Leave, founded by Rebecca Feinglos, and is timed to coincide with International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.
Where the Money Goes
Every dollar from ticket sales is earmarked for Equity Before Birth, a nonprofit CBS17 describes as supporting mothers and families across the Triangle region. The group's own site lays out exactly what that support looks like: covering the cost of doula services, midwifery care, therapy, perinatal education and transportation to doctor appointments, according to Equity Before Birth. The nonprofit also supplies essential baby items such as diapers, wipes, cribs and feeding supplies, the same page notes.
Beyond direct services, the organization runs the Liberated Birth Recovery Fund, which offers peer support, wellness coaching, financial literacy and paid-leave scholarships for working families, per its programs page. Equity Before Birth says it centers Black moms and birthing people who face barriers to culturally affirming care or encounter bias and discrimination in the healthcare system. Its listed service area covers Durham, Johnston, Wake, Orange and Chatham counties.
A Crisis the Numbers Keep Confirming
The event's framing taps into a maternal health picture that researchers and health reporters describe as dire and disproportionately deadly for Black mothers. Equity Before Birth states on its cause page that the rate of pregnancy-related death in the United States has more than doubled since 1987, and that over 60 percent of those deaths are preventable. Nationally, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to North Carolina Health News.
North Carolina's own report card is grim: the state received a D+ in the March of Dimes' 2025 report and has the 11th-highest infant mortality rate in the country, the outlet reports. In 2021, North Carolina's maternal mortality rate stood at 44 deaths per 100,000 births, compared with a national rate of 32.9 per 100,000 live births, the publication's earlier reporting found. More than 80 percent of maternal deaths are considered preventable, based on data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees cited by the same source.
What's Driving the Deaths
The causes behind those numbers are not uniform. Mental health conditions were the leading overall cause of pregnancy-related death in North Carolina in 2018 and 2019, followed by overdose, while homicide was the leading cause of death among Black mothers during that same window, North Carolina Health News reported. Discrimination was flagged as a probable contributing factor in nearly 70 percent of the state's pregnancy-related deaths during that period, and reviewers concluded that 85 percent of those deaths had at least some chance of being averted through reasonable changes to care.
The toll extends well past fatalities. For every pregnancy-related death in North Carolina, more than 40 deliveries involve what's classified as severe maternal morbidity — a so-called near miss, according to the same North Carolina Health News analysis. State health officials have also built a Maternal and Infant Health Data Dashboard intended to track trends, racial and ethnic inequities, and geographic differences in birth outcomes, per the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
Against that backdrop, Thursday's gathering at Cheeni is pitched as something smaller and more personal: a room where guests can talk openly about loss and survival over a shared meal, with the proceeds funneled directly into doula care, therapy and baby supplies for families navigating the very system the statistics describe. Event details and ticket information are available through Grieve Leave's events page.
