BLK MAMAS (Black Liberated Kin Mobilizing Access for Maternal Autonomy & Solidarity) Collective presents Seattle Black Maternal Health Week 2023 (#BMHW23). Reserve your spot here. 

Together with our community partners, we invite you to join us for Our Joy Be Full: Black Kin Healing the Collective Body , a dynamic community program in honor of BMHW 2023.

Seattle Black Maternal Health Week is a celebration of Black Moms & Black Motherhood including queer, trans, non-binary & gender nonconforming moms, aunties, other-mothers, grannies, sister mamas & muvas.

Each year, we join Black Mamas Matter Alliance and Black women across the U.S. for Black Maternal Health Week from April 11-17 to promote and amplify Black maternal health, rights, and reproductive justice.

We seek to further the celebration and awareness of Black maternal health, to build community amongst Black birthworkers and Black birthing people, and to provide resources to support healthy birth outcomes in the Black community. We also seek to bring the Seattle community into the national conversation on the crisis in Black maternal health, with a focus on community-based interventions and solutions. This offering is the only event of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. This year, we join BMMA for the official 2023 programming theme: Our Bodies Belong to Us: Restoring Black Autonomy and Joy.

In alignment with this year’s focus, we are cultivating space for a conversation about Black mamas reclaiming our bodily autonomy and embodied practices of joy. As we create safer, dignified space for us to name the experiences that compel us to reclaim and restore our joy and autonomy, we engage in healing practices that allow us to return to the body as the site and source of our power, pleasure, purpose, and plenitude as Black mamas and kin.

Our panel topics will include dialogue about Black mothers and families impacted by the criminal justice system, and centers those with experiences related to sex work and survivorship. Our goal is to remain present and intentional in our definitions of reproductive justice, and to re-center the dignity and humanity of all Black mamas, especially those who share these stories and lived experiences. In opening up this space, we aspire to undo the discourses of respectability that are too often leveraged in discussions of Black motherhood and who is deserving of our care, compassion and outrage when we acknowledge the crisis in Black maternal mortality.

We are so excited to share that Sabia Wade, author of Birthing Liberation: How Reproductive Justice Can Set Us Free, will be our keynote for the program as well as joining us for our RJ book club at LOVING ROOM a day before the program.

Sabia will be preceded by panelists and local gender justice advocates Ashley Albert and Doris O’Neal, as well as a Yoga Nidra practitioner Sophia Haddix. Please stay tuned for updates with the names of additional presenters, participants, and partners.

Program

• 2:00pm | Yoga Nidra with Sophia Haddix
• 3:00pm | BLK MAMA Marketplace & Catered Meal
• 4:00pm | Welcome Libation & Our Joy Be Full Panel
• 5:00pm | Keynote from Sabia Wade
• 5:45pm | Birthing Liberation Book Signing & Close

Included

• Yoga Nidra healing and restorative ancestral practice rooted in intentional rest (first 25 registrants – Black guests only, prioritizing Black birthing people and birthworkers)
• Access to BLK MAMA Marketplace
• Catered meal
• Swag bag with a signed copy of Birthing Liberation by Sabia Wade (first 50 registrants – Black guests only, prioritizing Black birthing people and birthworkers)

Accessibility

• Family-friendly program; infants and older youth are welcome. Supervised play is provided for children ages 2 to 10 years old.
• Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute (LHPAI) is an ADA accessible venue.
• Parking is available on site, as well as street parking.
• Public transportation: Bus routes 2, 14, and the Seattle Streetcar First Hill Line (stop at 14th & Washington).