As the founder of The Shades of Blue Project, Kay Matthews and her team are on a mission to uplift all birthing individuals with the care, respect, and dignity they deserve – no matter their social status or birth outcome. We focus on the birthing experience, and this is how we bridge the gaps by acknowledging everyone’s birth story matters. Through education, advocacy, and support, we are dedicated to helping birthing individuals of color whose lives are impacted by racial disparities that amplify their birthing struggles. It is from my own personal experience of infant loss and postpartum depression, that I’ve recognized a critical diversity gap in mental health resources and emotional support for Black and minority birthing individuals which is what we are working to dismantle through our work and advocacy.

Jamarah Amani, LM is a community midwife who believes in the transformative and healing power of birth and that every baby has a human right to human milk. Her mission is to do her part to build a movement for Birth Justice locally, nationally and globally. Jamarah is the architect of the Birth Justice framework, the Black Midwives Model of Care and the Birth Justice Bill of Rights. Jamarah identifies as Black, Femme and Queer.

A community organizer from the age of sixteen, Jamarah has worked with several organizations across the United States, the Caribbean and in Africa on various public health issues, including HIV prevention, infant mortality risk reduction, access to emergency contraception and access to midwifery care. As a birth worker and activist, Jamarah has been tackling issues of racial justice, including the epidemics of Black maternal and infant morbidity/mortality for over fifteen years. She is currently the Executive Director of Southern Birth Justice Network, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization working to expand the Birth Justice movement and to make midwifery and doula care accessible to marginalized communities. She is also the co-founder of National Black Midwives Alliance, the only national professional association in the U.S. specifically for midwives of African descent, and a founding member of the Queer and Transgender Midwives Association.

Jamarah is the recipient of the 2019 Trailblazer Award from the City of Miami, which proclaimed a day in her honor- Jamarah Amani Day, celebrated annually on March 14. She has been featured in a variety of media outlets including PBS, NPR, NBC and publications such as Vox, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post, among others. She has written for news outlets including the Miami Times and Miami Herald. Jamarah recently received the inaugural Umm Salaamah Sondra Abdullah- Zaimah Birthworker Award from Black Mamas Matter Alliance. In addition to parenting four children and watching the sunrise whenever possible, Jamarah offers midwifery care to families in South Florida and teaches workshops on Birth Justice to organizations across the United States.

Jamarah is currently producing a documentary entitled Legacy Power Voice: Movements in Black Midwifery with her partner, filmmaker Karyl-Lyn Sanderson.

Kiara Cruz is Senior Research Analyst with the Research and Strategy Team at Reproductive Health Impact. She is also a doctoral candidate who has expertise in centering Black and Brown women’s experiences to illuminate and identify how systems work to reinforce and create overlapping layers of hardship. She has nearly 10 years of experience working with public health agencies, community-based organizations, and non-profit organizations to address and dismantle maternal health inequities embedded in our healthcare and public health systems. She is the Research Director with the Research & Strategy Team at Reproductive Health Impact.

Susan Perez is a health services researcher whose research focuses on centering the voices, needs and experiences of birthing people in policy, education, and quality improvement. She has collaborated with the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the California Healthcare Foundation, and the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative to address health inequities through multifaceted approaches such as, measure development, health education campaigns, and provider education and tools.  She is a research consultant with the Research & Strategy Team at Reproductive Health Impact.

Zea Malawa is a mother, pediatrician and public health professional committed to improving health outcomes for children of color. Upon completing her undergraduate degree at Columbia University, she earned a medical doctorate from UCLA and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. Currently, Dr. Malawa is the director of Expecting Justice, a public health program that uses systems change and justice-oriented approaches to dismantle racism and close the racial gap in birth outcomes. In that capacity, she directs the Abundant Birth Project, the first pregnancy Guaranteed Income program in the US. She is the Perinatal Equity Medical Director at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and Adjunct Faculty at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She also sees patients at General Hospital in San Francisco and serves as the Vice Chair of San Francisco’s Department of Early Childhood Commission.

Michaela Taylor is a registered nurse and MPH graduate from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Her clinical experience includes health promotion, disease management, and public health nursing. She’s worked specifically with adolescents who were in the foster care system and/or were involved in the juvenile criminal legal system. Through her clinical experience, she became aware of the ways discriminatory health and social policies often take advantage of, rather than support people who have been marginalized. This drove her passion to address the social and systemic injustices that create health inequities among communities of color in the U.S. This passion is what brings her to her work with Expecting Justice where she is the Senior Manager for the Abundant Birth Project.

Marna Armstead has over twenty years as an entrepreneur and business developer. She is both a co-founder and the Executive Director of SisterWeb, A Community Doula Network in San Francisco, CA. In her role, She drives SisterWeb’s swift programmatic and fiscal expansions. She also operates Marna Mama Doula, which provides private doula consultations and services to women and families of color in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the nation.

Additionally, Marna has also built an extensive career in the printing and design industry. She is skilled in Copywriting, Print & Graphic Design, Branding Consulting, Event Planning, Project Management, Advertising & Marketing, Business Development Consulting, Financial Planning, and Business Management.

Marna enjoys spending time with her amazing, college-aged daughter, with whom she loves cooking, gardening, TV/Movie binging, reading, brunching, singing karaoke, and watching cat videos.

Carol Sakala, PhD, MSPH, is a nationally recognized thought leader in maternal health and maternity care, with expertise in maternity care system transformation and high-performing maternal care models. She is senior director for maternal health at the National Partnership for Women & Families and has led the organization’s maternal health portfolio for more than a decade. 

Dr. Sakala is lead author of 2024 reports on Realizing the Potential of Maternity Care Payment Reform. She was a member of the Clinical Episode Payment Workgroup of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (LAN), which developed guidance on maternity care episode payment, and of the strategy team that led the LAN’s Maternity Multistakeholder Action Collaborative. Her considerable involvement with maternity care performance measurement includes serving for many years as co-chair of the National Quality Forum’s Perinatal and Women’s Health Standing Committee and on numerous other measurement-related advisory bodies. Among many other advisory bodies, she was a member of the National Academies for Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Study Committee on Assessing Outcomes by Birth Setting. She is the lead author of recent major reports on several high-performing maternal care models—midwifery care, community birth settings, and doula support. She works to delineate health care’s role in meeting the social, mental health, and physical health needs of childbearing families and is the lead author of Raising the Bar for Maternal Health Equity and Excellence: Actionable Strategies for Healthcare Systems.

Dr. Sakala has been an investigator on all Listening to Mothers surveys, beginning in 2002. She currently serves as principal investigator of the Fourth National Listening to Mothers Survey, which will begin to report a rich array of data about views and experiences of childbearing women and people with 2023 births early in 2025.