Common Knowledge Trust is a registered New Zealand charity set up in 1996. Our goals and objects are: To promote the understanding and tolerance of diversified health issues/wellness systems in relation to the individual, families, groups, societies and cultures: locally and nationally (and internationally).
We seek to:
- Promote the conservation of diversified health/wellness knowledge.
- Educate people in the diversified health/wellness knowledge known by culturally diversified groups.
- Promote ‘Common Knowledge’ approaches in regards to the health/wellness of individuals, families and cultural groups
Common Knowledge Trust encourages the sharing of traditional and indigenous health and wellness information worldwide. The Trust has two major branches through which health and wellness knowledge is shared:
‘Celebrating Common Knowledge’
One branch of our Trust is to welcome people of all cultures to share what is their common health and wellness knowledge through our newsletter and international get-togethers. For more information see our 1998 Gathering in Zimbabwe.
Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method®
The second branch of our Trust houses both the concept and resource placed into the Trust in 1996 called Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method®. Hundreds of ordinary families in the US in the early 1970s helped to develop these extraordinary skills to prepare the pregnant body to give birth and to work through the birth journey any baby takes with the mother.
• To have as safe a birth as possible
• To face the unknown of the coming birth with confidence
• To stay on top of and in control of their birth experience even in the most challenging situations
• To look back on their baby’s birth with pride and empowerment
Families wanted something to do together as they made the journey from pregnancy through birth to being a mother and fathers.
We share one thing in common … our human body and it is in our woman’s body that our baby grow sand out of our woman’s body that our baby comes … no matter the type of birth. Men share the same body and can easily learn skills to prepare the body to birth and skills to work alongside the mother’s efforts.
Families placed the concept that all expectant parents should prepare the body for birth and learn skills to work through their baby’s birth journey into Common Knowledge Trust along with the skills. We were asked to create a resource of these skills for self-learning in one’s own home. We were asked to tell everyone that
Common Knowledge Trust takes this mission to grow a skilled birthing population very seriously because all Pink Kit families know that we can birth better because these skills cross over all boundaries and borders of culture, race, beliefs and religions and regardless of where or with whom a woman births. And Common Knowledge Trust has carried forward the skills fathers have passed on from conception to birth and through birth into fathering.
All proceeds of the sale of the resources of Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method® go directly to further the aims of Common Knowledge Trust.
All women carry the future generation of Women and Men in their body and birth them from their body. Any man can plant the Seed of Life within a Woman. We are ALL ONE. We all blink, cough, know happiness and sorrow. There is our collective biological Common Knowledge. We cannot separate ourselves one from another.
Humanity also has a very creative Mind. With Mind, humankind has developed cultures, societies, religions, beliefs, skills, tools and stories that are diverse. This diversity brings beauty and is our cultural Common Knowledge. This is what we use to separate ourselves.
What Cultural Common Knowledge can we share?
- The ‘front of the house’.
There are many aspects of cultural traditions that people enjoy sharing with others. This is where Common Knowledge Trust would like to develop international gatherings with people in those cultures.
- the ‘back of our house’.
There are aspects of every cultural or religious group that will never be shared with those not part of that group. Common Knowledge Trust is not trying to get groups to share this part of their cultures or beliefs.
- Losing our traditions
The loss of traditional knowledge and skills is as significant as that of the loss of species or seed diversity.
Common Knowledge Trust is not seeking to blend modern health skills with culturally diverse ones. Instead, we are interested in identifying cultural knowledge as it’s own unique information. If people within a culture wish to blend the two or keep them separate, then that is their own response to the global impact of modern health knowledge.
Where does Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method® fit into our Common Knowledge?
We share common human body yet each pregnant woman has her own unique life, will move through her pregnancy and birth uniquely to her. Yet every woman can prepare her pregnant body to birth and every woman should have skills for use during the birth journey she takes. Birthing Better is the front of our house and our own pregnancy and birth situation is the back of the house. In other words, what happens to and around any pregnant woman is unique to her situation. Her ability to use skills is what each of us can do not matter what is happening to or around us.