Why This Role Exists
Too many families in NJ begin parenthood without the support the first 1,000 days require. Maternal and infant health outcomes here lag behind other states; prenatal and postpartum care is uneven, and families navigating pregnancy, birth, and early childhood are too often left to coordinate it alone.
The evidence on what helps is clear: continuous, trusted, community-based support through pregnancy, birth, and a child's earliest years measurably improves outcomes for parents and babies alike.
BRICK's bet is that this workforce should not be imported into our community. It should be built from it — because the people best positioned to walk alongside families are fellow community members, and because a good job in a growing field is itself a family-stabilizing force.
We are hiring a Director to build a career pathway that recruits community members, trains and credentials them as Community Doulas, and supports them on a maternal health career ladder — serving the families in BRICK Healthy Beginnings.
What Makes This Different
Most workforce programs train people and hand them a certificate. BRICK is building the employer alongside the training. Graduates of this pathway are hired into the BRICK Doula Network, a Medicaid-billable service line this Director will design, launch, and grow.
That means this role owns the full arc: who gets recruited, how they're trained, who certifies them, where they work, what they're paid, how the work gets reimbursed, and whether the whole thing sustains itself. It is a program design job, a workforce job, and a health-care business-model job at once.
For the right person, this is the chance to build something that does not yet exist in Newark — and to prove a model other cities can run.
Key Responsibilities
Build the Career Pathway
- Design the end-to-end pathway: recruitment, training, credentialing, supervised field experience, employment, and advancement.
- Build the recruitment pipeline— community organizations, BRICK families and alumni, faith networks, and BRICK's own high school students as an early-exposure feeder.
- Define the career ladder beyond entry-level doula work: lead doula, trainer, supervisor, and adjacent roles in community health.
- Own completion, credentialing, and job-placement rates, and intervene when cohorts fall behind.
Build and Lead the BRICK Doula Network
- Design the Doula Network's operating model: employment structure, compensation, benefits, supervision ratios, caseload standards, and on-call coverage.
- Recruit, hire, onboard, and retain doulas — and treat retention as a core metric, not an afterthought.
- Build clinical supervision and quality assurance so care is consistent and safe across the network.
- Integrate doula services into the Healthy Beginnings continuum across prenatal, birth, postpartum, and the first 1,000 days.
- Grow the network's capacity in step with referral volume and reimbursement.
Own Reimbursement and Sustainability
- Lead Medicaid strategy end to end: NJ FamilyCare doula certification, MCO contracting, credentialing, billing infrastructure, documentation standards, and revenue cycle.
- Own the unit economics — cost per doula, cost per family served, reimbursement per encounter, and the path to a sustainable blended-revenue model.
- Manage the budget and support fundraising, grant reporting, and funder relationships with a clear sustainability narrative.
- Build the clinical and community partnerships that generate referrals and reimbursement: hospitals, FQHCs, OB practices, WIC, home-visiting programs, and public agencies.
Lead the Team and the Data
- Build a mission-aligned team, set clear expectations, coach directly, and hold people accountable for outcomes.
- Run a regular performance cycle on pathway and network data, and lead improvement plans when metrics slip.
- Ensure compliance with privacy, documentation, quality, and payer requirements.
- Represent the pathway externally with funders, partners, policymakers, and the community.
Key Performance Indicators
Qualifications
Who You Are
Required
- Significant leadership experience in maternal health, community health, public health, workforce development, or early childhood — with at least [N] years managing teams and budgets.
- You have built or substantially scaled something. This is not a caretaking role; the pathway does not fully exist yet.
- Experience designing or running a training-to-employment program, apprenticeship, or credentialing pipeline.
- Fluency with health care reimbursement — Medicaid, managed care, value-based care, or another third-party payer environment — and comfort owning a revenue line.
- Strong command of the first 1,000 days, birth equity, and community-based care models.
- You use data to make decisions and can build the systems that produce it.
- Deep commitment to racial equity, family voice, and community-led solutions — and to hiring Newark residents into these roles.
Preferred
- Certified doula, birth worker, lactation consultant, or community health worker, or direct experience supervising them.
- Roots in or long-standing relationships within Newark and the South Ward.
- Experience launching a Medicaid-billable service line from scratch.
- Spanish or Portuguese language fluency.
- P&L or earned-revenue ownership.
