Jill Brown

My name is Jill Brown and I am a scholar, a mother, and a poet. Today, I serve as the Executive Director of the Kalahari Peoples Fund that supports the rights of the indigenous San communities to health, education, livelihood, land and language, in southern Africa. I also work as a Professor of Psychological Science at Creighton University. As a child, I was adopted into a farm family in rural Nebraska, on the traditional lands of the Pawnee. I have lived in this land most of my life but spent some significant years living in Namibia and India. Most of my work over the last 25 years has examined kinship and childcare practices, specifically the gifting of children and alloparental care in and out of times of crisis in communities in southern Africa. I have learned how children are gifted, and shared, how parents refuse and negotiate and how beliefs about suffering and perseverance shape these practices. My current research explores how worldview informs sharing practices cross culturally.

In my early adulthood, I lived with an Owambo speaking family for three years on the Namibia Angola Border, working as a Peace Corps volunteer with youth. I saw a different way of being in northern Namibia, one that was relational, one that was connected. It was not a way of life without hardship, but offered a different logic of living from the worldview of individualism and conquest that I had grown up with. I returned and conducted research for the past 25 years in southern Africa studying alloparenting and how aspects of the evolved nest operate in rural Africa. While I spent most of my life observing, I am an evolved nest ambassador, because the birth of my daughter was accompanied by an awareness and intuition of the evolved nest in my life.  I was determined (driven by something beyond my rational self) to provide a nest for her. I was preoccupied to have a peaceful, welcoming natural birth. Through my journey of motherhood, I have had the quiet intuition of the components of the evolved nest–looking for alloparents in my stepdaughters and friends, co-sleeping and carrying my babies, walking outside when my children needed calming, grieving my own unnestedness in community with others. Encountering the evolved nest curriculum has given me a basket to gather these experiences, a language to express what often passed quietly between my children, partners and I, and a framework upon which to build and imagine a new world.

Geographical Location: Omaha, NE, traditional lands of the Omaha and Ponca peoples

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Field of Interest or Profession: Cultural Psychologist

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Project Description: I am integrating the nine component of the evolved nest into the courses I teach to undergraduate psychology students.

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