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LEADERSHIP
Staff
JENNIFER BRAUN
Executive Director
Jennifer Braun has served disadvantaged women and children in Afghanistan, Haiti and Uganda since 2004.
As Executive Director of IMA, she travels several times a year to oversee the organization's international programs as well as to work in the field as a midwife. She has been attending births since 1982.
Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She holds a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University. She was President of the Colorado Midwives Association from 1985 to 1992 during which she was a citizen lobbyist, working to pass legislation that is now the Colorado Midwives Practice Act. She also co-authored the first CMA Certification Program.
Jennifer has been an educator since the late 1980s, training midwives from apprenticeship through licensure as well as teaching at CU-Boulder and the Southwest Acupuncture College-Boulder Campus. She has been honored with recognition from Volvo for Life (2006), the Echievement Award (2007 and 2020), and Boulder Weekly named her Person of the Year in 2008.
Board of Directors
DR. CLAUDIA WYRICK
President
Dr. Claudia Wyrick is a medical doctor, a practicing family physician and hospitalist in Denver. She traveled to Soroti, Uganda in 2008 and again in 2010 to collaborate with staff at the Teso Safe Motherhood Project (TSMP) to improve clinical care. Having already volunteered at community free clinics, House of Hope women’s shelter and a health clinic in Nepal’s Dhading Valley, Claudia is community service minded. “I have always had a desire and felt a responsibility to work with those people who are underserved and who have not had the opportunities I have had in my life.”
In addition to practicing as a physician, she also holds advanced degrees in special education and fine arts and is a published writer and poet. She resides in Lakewood, Colorado with her husband, Danny. She has three grown children, and five grandchildren.
JENNIFER BARR
Secretary / Treasurer
Jennifer Barr is a Certified Professional Midwife and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist.
In addition to serving as board secretary/treasurer for IMA, she sits on the board of the Pajwell Foundation. Jennifer joined IMA while the organization was still in its inception, seeing an opportunity to work for maternal and child health in the developing world: “I believe strongly that health care is a right not a privilege. I uphold the midwifery model of care as the ideal for pregnancy worldwide.”
She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, three daughters, two cats and a dog.
REV. MARTY McCARTHY
Board Member
Rev. Marty McCarthy is an ordained Episcopal Minister who graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1978. Marty was rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Charlotte, NC from 1995 to 2008. He is the founder of six schools, has been a Rotarian for over 30 years, and serves and has served on many boards. He is currently working on the Elizabeth Program, Mentoring for Medicine, to identify, mentor and return to long-term medical service students from under-served rural and urban communities, addressing the largest health care need in the state of North Carolina and beyond. He and his wife Cindy have two adult children and one new grandbaby.
LIZA PATRICK
Board Member
Liza Patrick is the program coordinator for Boulder County Public Health’s Nurse-Family Partnership, a program that supports vulnerable first-time parents experiencing low income. A nurse-midwife for over 20 years, Liza’s career has focused on maternal/child health and supporting and advocating for under-served women and families. Liza holds a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies with a concentration in Women’s Health from the University of Massachusetts, a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s in Nursing with a Certificate in Nurse-Midwifery from the University of Pennsylvania. Liza has two children, and lives with her husband Mark in Boulder, CO.
LORRAINE FAIRMONT
Board Member
Lorraine Fairmont has been a Certified Nurse Midwife for 30 years. As someone devoted to public health, past jobs included labor & delivery and community health at Denver Health, labor & delivery in the Navajo Nation, (Chinle, AZ) and midwifery at People’s Clinic in Boulder, Colorado. She ran a holistic women’s health practice in Boulder.
She has been tracking the critical work of IMA since its inception, and brings the vision for this lifesaving, life enhancing program, perfected by Jennifer and team to be used as a model for other agencies working internationally, or high risk areas of the US.
Lorraine received her BA from Yale, and a BS in nursing and MSN in midwifery from the University of Colorado. She was a founding board member of The Chinook Fund, a social change organization in Denver. The lucky mother of four adult children, she gets to help care
for two grandchildren and lives with her husband in Boulder.
