Natacha Blain, JD, PhD, serves as the Senior Board Director of the Board on Children, Youth and Families (BCYF) and the Committee on Law and Justice (CLAJ) at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She has over 25 years of experience working with policymakers and senior legislative officials on a variety of social justice issues and campaigns including serving as a Supreme Court Fellow, Chief Counsel to Senator Dick Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Lead Strategic Advisor for the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign. Prior to joining the National Academies, Dr. Blain served as Associate Director/Acting Executive Director of Grantmakers for Children, Youth and Families (GCYF). There she played a critical role in helping convene and engage diverse constituencies, fostering leadership, collaboration and innovation-sharing through a network of funders committed to the enduring well-being of children, youth and families. Dr. Blain earned her Master of Science and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Allegheny University of Health Sciences and MCP – Hahnemann University (now Drexel University) respectively, and her Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Villanova School of Law.

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. They focus on the birthing experience, and this is how they bridge the gaps: by acknowledging everyone’s birth story matters. Through education, advocacy, and support, they are dedicated to helping birthing individuals of color whose lives are impacted by racial disparities that amplify their birthing struggles. It is from her own personal experience of infant loss and postpartum depression, that Kay has recognized a critical diversity gap in mental health resources and emotional support for Black and minority birthing individuals which is what she is working to dismantle through her 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.

Carol Sakala leads maternal health and maternity care programming at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She is a long-time maternity care advocate, educator, researcher, author and policy analyst, with a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and their families. Sakala sits on advisory bodies and work groups focusing on payment reform, performance measurement and other ways to improve the quality of maternity care. She has been an investigator on all national Listening to Mothers surveys (2002-) and was principal investigator of the most recent Listening to Mothers in California survey. She helps create or commission foundational resources for the field on such topics as the cost of having a baby, maternity care and liability, evidence-based maternity care, effectiveness of labor support, hormonal physiology of childbearing and performance of the nation’s maternity care system. She led the National Partnership’s recent convening and collaboration of 17 national leaders resulting in the consensus report, Blueprint for Advancing High-Value Maternity Care Through Physiologic Childbearing. Through her guidance, the National Partnership maintains childbirthconnection.org, which features results of systematic reviews to support childbearing women in informed maternity care decision making and helps them navigate the maternity care system. She was a Pew Health Policy fellow at Boston University, where she received her doctorate in health policy through the University Professors Program, and has master’s degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Chicago.

Sinsi Hernández-Cancio, JD, is a vice president at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she leads the Health Justice team. She is a national health and health care equity policy and advocacy thought leader with 25 years of experience advancing equal opportunity for women and families of color, and almost 20 years advocating for increased health care access and improved quality of care for underserved communities. Sinsi is deeply committed to transforming our health care system to meet the needs of our rapidly evolving nation so we can all thrive together. She believes that our future prosperity depends on ensuring our health care system routinely provides excellent, comprehensive, culturally centered and affordable care for every single person, family and community, and that this requires the dismantling of structural inequities including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry.

Sinsi is a recognized leader in the national health equity movement, a sought-after strategic advisor and a dynamic, inspiring speaker. She has presented at national events across the country and served on numerous advisory committees for organizations including the National Academy of Medicine, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs and the American Association of Pediatrics. She has published extensively and has appeared in national and state level English and Spanish television, radio and print media.

Sinsi’s extensive experience in health and health equity policy and advocacy spans the state government, labor and non-profit arenas. Prior to joining the National Partnership’s staff, she was the founding director of Families USA’s Center on Health Equity Action for System Transformation, where she led efforts to advance health equity and reduce disparities in health outcomes and health care access and quality by leveraging health care and delivery system transformation to reduce persistent racial, ethnic and geographic health inequities with an intersectional lens. Prior to that, she advised and represented two governors of Puerto Rico on federal health and human services policies, and she worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as a senior health policy analyst and national campaign coordinator for their Healthcare Equality Project campaign to enact the Affordable Care Act.

Nan Strauss is the Senior Policy Analyst for Maternal Health at the National Partnership for Women & Families, where she advocates for policies that center the needs of women and families of color, with the aim of dismantling racism. She previously served as the Managing Director of Policy, Advocacy & Grantmaking for Every Mother Counts, where she led the organization’s efforts to improve access to quality, respectful, and equitable care, both globally and in the U.S. As the Director of Maternal Health Research and Policy at Amnesty International USA, she co-authored the groundbreaking report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA. Nan has led extensive federal and state policy work, including the development and implementation of legislation and policy strategies to advance maternal health, human rights, and birth justice. As a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nan litigated cases in federal court, including a successful challenge to the U.S. FDA’s refusal to make emergency contraception available over-the-counter, as well as challenges to abortion bans.

Wilna Paulemon is a public health professional with a passion for promoting health equity and improving global maternal health outcomes. As Associate Director of U.S. Programs, she is responsible for supporting activities related to the U.S. Safer Childbirth Cities initiative and priority global maternal health advocacy engagements.

Wilna first joined the Merck for Mothers team in 2019 as a graduate summer associate through the Merck internship program. Her tasks included developing recommendations for the community of practice of the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative and supporting other activities related to the announcement of the first cohort of grantees under the Safer Childbirth Cities initiative in the fall of 2019.

Prior to her role as Associate Director of U.S. Programs at Merck for Mothers, Wilna worked at Partners In Health, where she developed COVID-19 related materials that helped public sector partners implement effective and equitable pandemic response programs. She also has experience as a global health consultant, where she supported various programmatic, policy and strategic projects focused on COVID-19, vaccine confidence and health systems strengthening.

Wilna holds bachelor’s degrees in Community Health and Child Development from Tufts University and a master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University.

Alexandra has over 15 years of consulting experience working with philanthropic and corporate clients to develop strategies and assess impact. At Afton Bloom, Alexandra has advised leading philanthropists on strategy development, design of innovative funding mechanisms, equitable approaches to partnership engagement and more. She also supports growing non-profits with a focus on racial and gender equity to design strategies and build their capacity to grow as critical actors in the field. Her work has specialized in mental health, reproductive health, birth equity, and advancing women in technology and venture capital. Her clients include the Hewlett Foundation, Community Health Acceleration Partnership (CHAP), the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the AAKOMA Project, LatinasRepresent, and more. 

Prior to founding Afton Bloom, she served as a Director at FSG where she led the Global Health practice and founded the Gender Equity practice area. In her eight year tenure at the firm, she led strategy projects for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Samsung, Merck Foundation, and Humana. She built a deep understanding of the important role of the private sector in philanthropy and gained perspective on how philanthropy can best be used as a tool for social change. 

She holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a Graduate Certificate from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a BA in Asian Studies and Mathematics from Hamilton College.  

She speaks Mandarin Chinese and in her free time enjoys weekly backgammon, photography, and running.

Léah Lomotey-Nakon, PhD is a scholar-practitioner who leverages over 15 years of experience across academic, philanthropic, and corporate healthcare settings to research and advance healthcare and health philanthropy strategies. As a scholar, Leah designs participatory, arts-based and mixed-method reproductive and organizational bioethics research in the Southern US and West Africa. As a practitioner, Léah uses human-centered, trust- and arts-based methods to facilitate creative and meaningful experiences for groups and teams focused on justice-based strategy and innovation projects.

At Afton Bloom, Léah deploys her decade of experience in philanthropy to lead projects that help funders advance parent and child health policy and related reproductive health strategies at the local, state, and national levels.

Léah earned a PhD in Bioethics, a M.Ed. in community and organizational development and a M.T.S. in social ethics from Vanderbilt University as well as a BA in political science from Emory University. Her research has been supported by the Aspen Institute, RWJF/Johns Hopkins Health Policy Research Scholars, Hastings Institute, and the Meharry-Vanderbilt Engaged Research Core, and Social Science Research Council, among others. She currently also serves as an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Baylor University.