Amy Ellen Polk Memorial Scholarship
Application Deadline: MARCH 10, 2025
This scholarship was developed in memory of Amy Ellen Polk, a devoted wife, dedicated mother of two, talented transportation engineer, and passionate and outspoken advocate for a Takoma Park, Maryland-based birthing center.
The annual scholarship provides a tuition grant for a How to Start a Birth Center Workshop offered by the American Association of Birth Centers. If the recipient attends an in-person workshop, an additional $500 is awarded for travel expenses.
The workshop is offered in two formats:
Online course that you can complete at your own pace, in your own home
Multi-day, in-person workshop. In 2025 the workshop will be offered September 9-11 in Portland, Oregon, immediately preceding the AABC Birth Institute.
Learn more about the AABC How to Start a Birth Center Workshops at www.BirthCenters.org.
Scholarship Criteria
To be eligible for the scholarship you must be actively working on the development of a freestanding birth center in your community and demonstrate financial need. Applicants cannot have previously attended the How to Start a Birth Center Workshop or purchased the online workshop in the last three years. Scholarships must be used in the year they are awarded.
How to Apply
Only complete applications will be reviewed. Please follow these steps for your best scholarship application.
Step 1: Download the Amy E Polk Scholarship Application Overview
Step 2: Review tips for a strong application.
Step 3: Prepare your application answers
Step 4: Complete and submit the online scholarship application.
All applications are blinded and assigned a number to reduce the chance of unconscious bias.
Questions? Contact us at admin@aabcfoundation.org or call 215-234-8068
About Amy Polk
Amy was a compassionate and intensely motivated woman who pursued her goals with confidence. "She was very high-energy; when she knew what she wanted, she just went and did it; ... when she set her mind to something, it was just going to happen," says her widower, John Robinette, adding that his wife's enthusiasm for a birthing center came from her experiences with a similar center in Bethesda, Maryland that has since closed.
"We had two fantastic birth experiences at the Maternity Center in Bethesda, and then it shut down," he said. "To have that option go away didn't seem right, so she set out to fix that problem. ... In some ways, it feels like Amy died in childbirth with this infant child in [the form of] the birth center."
Both of Robinette's and Polk's two sons, Adam and Brian were born at the Bethesda maternity center before it closed in 2007.
Amy envisioned a birth center that would provide individualized care in a home-like setting to women throughout the lifespan, from onset of menstruation, through the childbearing years, to menopause and beyond. She sought to create a birth center that would monitor the physical, psychological, and social well-being of the woman throughout the childbearing cycle; provide individualized education, counseling, and prenatal care, continuous hands-on assistance during labor and delivery, and postpartum support; and minimize technological interventions. This birth center would do nothing short of improving her community.
It is the hope of Amy’s friends, family and colleagues that this scholarship will empower other like-minded individuals to start birth centers in their own hometowns as well.
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