From the Village Hatch Built to the Community Love’s Pathway Is Becoming
There’s something that happens when you plant seeds in the right soil — even after the season ends, they find a way to keep growing.
That’s the only way I know how to describe what’s unfolding right now with Love’s Pathway, and why I want you to know this story.
Some of you knew Hatch Community. You knew what it stood for. A village built around young parents under 25 — a place designed not just to deliver services, but to actually build community from the inside out. The architecture of Hatch was always about more than programs. It was about nervous systems. About building a web of support so dense and so warm that the vicarious trauma that fractures so many care-based organizations never got a foothold. Birth doulas, postpartum doulas, nurturing touch doulas, street doulas — it was one of the most holistic, community-centered models I have ever had the privilege of being part of. After significant success, Hatch closed in 2020.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand about real organizational work: when something is built right — built from the community, by the community, in service of something true — it doesn’t just end. It graduates.
Enter Love’s Pathway.
Founded by Shayanna Love, a graduate of Hatch’s 2017 doula training program, Love’s Pathway is what happens when the spark of transformation doesn’t go out — it ignites the next fire. Shayanna is a full-spectrum doula and community advocate who recognized the unique challenges faced by foster and formerly incarcerated young people and their families — and she became the living proof that the work Hatch started was never finished. It was just waiting to be carried forward by the people it grew. Love’s Pathway is a Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to empowering foster and formerly incarcerated adolescents who are expecting or parenting, working to break cycles of violence and build a foundation for long-term family well-being.
What began as a young mom navigating resources and community has evolved from a passion into something much more. That’s the throughline of this work. It’s always personal first. And then it becomes structural. The transformation of generations doesn’t happen in spite of lived experience — it happens because of it. Shayanna didn’t just graduate from Hatch. She became its continuing spark.
Now Love’s Pathway and Hatch are coming back together — Shayanna and I are partnering to rebirth what Hatch started, with Love’s Pathway as the living legacy organization leading the way. The doula training programs — birth, postpartum, and nurturing touch doulas — are coming back. The street doula program is expanding into a full community health worker model. And the reach is growing from Alameda County into Contra Costa County, San Francisco County, and beyond, with strategic hubs of support being built for families who need a real web — not a referral list.
The Physics of a Village.
Here’s what I want to be clear about, because I know some of you think about this the way I do: this isn’t a rebrand. It’s a village. And a village, from a physics perspective, only has integrity when all its parts are included.
That means all of a person. Not just the role they play or the need they bring through the door — but the whole human. Every intersection of identity. Race, culture, age, gender, history, trauma, joy, grief, strength. The parts that the system has tried to separate out and categorize and manage. A true village doesn’t ask people to leave pieces of themselves outside. It finds ways of interacting across those intersections — across difference and similarity both — and builds shared resource and shared support from that whole cloth. When all parts are present, the structure has real integrity. It can hold weight. It can sustain.
And here’s what makes this model different: it doesn’t just serve — it grows together. The community that Love’s Pathway is building is not a provider-client relationship. It is a village where everyone is a resource for someone else, where the act of receiving support and the act of offering it are not opposites but part of the same circuit. The doulas who train through this program become the support for the next generation of families. The families become the community that holds the next round of doulas. The nervous systems in the room regulate one another. That’s not a metaphor. That is the physics of how humans actually work.
What sets Love’s Pathway apart isn’t just the programs — it’s the process, personal experiences, and intentions behind them. Shayanna understands because she has navigated love’s pathway from her life, through Hatch and now beyond — each experience informing how to better serve those around her. That can’t be manufactured, and it can’t be taught from a distance. It is grown, together, over time, in community.
Get Involved.
If this work resonates with you — if you’re in the Bay Area and connected to families, organizations, or systems that touch young parents, foster youth, or system-impacted communities — I want to hear from you. Love’s Pathway is building hubs of support and building partnerships, and there is a place for people who understand that transforming generations requires an actual village.
Visit lovespathway.org to learn more, get involved, or connect.
The seeds Hatch planted are still growing. Love’s Pathway is the bloom. And the bloom becomes the next seed.
With love and in community,
Kat
P.S. Want to know more about the rebirth of Hatch and what’s coming? Stay tuned — there’s more to share. And as always, if something here is landing for you, hit reply. I read every one.