Decolonizing Maternal Health Retreat: South Africa

Rarely do multi-disciplinary, multi-racial and multi-cultural providers and practitioners have the opportunity to convene and to take extraordinary measures to decolonize the landscape and the broader ecosystem of maternal health.

Black Women’s Blueprint is convening an inter-tribal and global gathering and cross-continental learning-exchange to:

1. Share public and private health solutions to maternal health
2. Learn culturally specific, innovative and life-saving practices in maternal health led by Black communities in South Africa
3. Immerse in a structural, cultural change approach that lays the foundation for practitioners and advocates to scale your diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and core cultural competencies and address maternal mortality and morbidity. Every participant will come home to practice approaches that produce health equity.

We invite maternal and newborn-health practitioners in the United States and Indigenous midwives, traditional healers and integrative medicine doctors in South Africa come together for a path-breaking 7 days of study, ritual and immersion in order to decolonize maternal health.

Every year in the U.S. 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die — by many measures, the worst record in the developed world. We are devastatingly, far behind our peer-nations, when it comes to preventing and intervening on the issue of maternal death and morbidity here at home. Though vast in its services, the U.S. struggles to address unmet needs associated with lack of access to respectful, high value, culturally congruent, trauma-informed maternity services. Unfortunately, giving birth and accessing perinatal healthcare  in the U.S. is already far more dangerous, especially for Black women and other birthing people of color, than in many other countries.

There are outcomes that doctors, midwives and traditional birth attendants have been able to turn out results for interrupting maternal mortality and morbidity that have not been possible in the U.S to date. We already have the anecdotal evidence that these interventions have real impact and prevent maternal mortality and morbidity and disrupts the impact of trauma and abuse on perinatal outcomes. Through our research we have started to investigate life-saving strategies to support women in the US and globally.

Our facilitator cohort is composed of providers in the field of maternal and reproductive health, research-practitioners, and university partners. We will provide the rare opportunity for doctors to be in conversation with traditional healers and gain a whole new understanding of how childbirth is supported in other contexts.

This cross-continental learning-exchange is for maternal and newborn-health practitioners. Physicians, midwives, public health professionals  and administrators, reproductive health groups, advocates, policy makers and researchers, join us for seven unforgettable days of learning, research and real-time interventions for maternal health.

You can choose to pay a Deposit or to make a Full Payment.