Why I Built Core Compass
A Core Stories essay by Aika Aluc, MPH
Published May 19, 2026
My mother carried me through nine months of being unable to keep food down. She was in and out of hospitals for IVs so she wouldn't become dangerously dehydrated. When she finally went into labor, I began losing oxygen. They performed an emergency C-section to save me.
She did this in a country whose language was not her first. In a healthcare system whose cultural norms were not her own. With providers who did not always understand what she was asking for, or what she needed.
I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand what made that experience possible, and what makes versions of it still possible, every day, for women across this country.
That is, in the simplest terms, why Core Compass exists.
I was eleven the first time I saw a baby being born. I was on a city bus. A woman went into labor in front of all of us, and the bus stopped, and people moved. They moved with such instinct and tenderness, covering her, surrounding her, making space. Someone called an ambulance. Someone else held her hand. By the time the paramedics arrived, the baby had arrived too.
I think about that bus often. The chaos and the community happening in the same breath. The way strangers became kin. The way care can look like a stranger's coat thrown around a laboring woman's shoulders. And the way, even in that improvisation, you could feel the system in the background, slower to arrive, less attuned, less personal than the people who were already there.
That was the first time I understood, without having the words for it yet, that systems and people are not the same thing. And that the gap between them is where so much harm, and so much possibility, lives.
For a long time after that, I thought I was going to be a pediatrician. In high school I tried to shadow one, but I could not find a pediatrician to take me on. What I did find was an OB/GYN willing to open her practice to me, and what I saw there changed the direction of everything.
It was the first time I witnessed a birth inside a hospital. The first time I watched a vaginal delivery up close. The first time I saw a circumcision. The first time I understood what the inside of a labor and delivery room actually looked like, the sterility, the speed, the way bodies moved through it. My city bus moment had been one version of birth. This was another. And somewhere between those two versions, I started to understand how much of what shapes a birth has nothing to do with the birth itself.
I carried that experience into college, where I thought I would become an OB/GYN. Every lever in this work matters, and the village that holds women and families through these moments is doing some of the most important work there is. But the more curious I got, the more I noticed I was asking a different kind of question than the one a clinician asks. Why was care so unevenly distributed? Why did some women get the version of birth that was photographed and celebrated, and others got the version that ended in fear, or grief, or silence? Why did the data keep getting worse for Black and brown women, and why did the response to that data feel so slow?
The more questions I asked, the less it felt like I was choosing public health. It felt like public health was choosing me.
I went into the field to ask better questions. I worked in research because I wanted to understand what the data was actually saying, and what it was leaving out. I worked in programs because I wanted to see how interventions move from a strategy on paper to a real change in someone's life. I worked in policy because I wanted to understand the levers, the ones that could be pulled to change something at scale. I worked in funding because I came to see how resources shape what is possible and what gets left behind. And I worked in advocacy because I learned that data alone does not move systems. People do. Stories do. Communities do.
Somewhere in those years, I started to notice something about myself. Every role I had taken, researcher, program lead, policy lead, funder-adjacent, advocate, eventual PhD candidate, certified wellness professional, was a different way of asking the same question.
What does it take for women and families to be cared for, all the way through?
For a long time I worried that the breadth of my work meant I had not focused. Eventually I understood that the breadth was the focus. The connections between research and policy, between policy and lived experience, between systems and stories, those connections are not detours. They are the work.
Core Compass is what happens when I leaned into that.
Today is my birthday. It is also the day Core Compass becomes a public-facing company. I did not plan it that way at first. But once I noticed, I could not unnotice it.
My mother fought to bring me into the world. The woman on the bus brought her baby into the world surrounded by strangers who knew, without being asked, how to show up. Every day, somewhere, a woman is doing this same impossible, ordinary thing, and the system around her is either holding her, or failing her, or both.
Core Compass exists to make more holding possible. We work with organizations, institutions, and initiatives navigating complexity in maternal and women's health. We bring strategy, research, advocacy, and embodied wellness practice to the work, because the women and families at the center of these systems deserve all of it, not just one piece.
We are not here to write reports that sit on shelves. We are here to translate evidence into action, narrative into change, and complexity into clarity. We are here to pull levers, small ones, sometimes, that ripple outward.
If any of this resonates, I would love to hear from you. Whether you have a specific project in mind or you are still figuring out what you need, the conversation begins the same way. We listen.
To my mother, thank you for the life you fought to give me. To the woman on the bus, wherever you are, thank you for the lesson I did not know I was learning. To everyone who has built me into who I am, this is the work I am here to do.
Welcome to Core Compass.
— Aika
Core Compass, LLC was founded in 2025 and launched publicly on May 19, 2026. To work with us, visit corecompass.co/contact or submit an inquiry at our intake form.
