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This month, Maven Co-President and Co-Founder Jhumpa Bhattacharya spoke with Blue Shield of California Foundation’s Krysten Massa about how historical patterns in care work have shaped contemporary narrative — especially when it comes to Black women in caregiving roles.
Jhumpa highlights the long history of Black women's contributions to care work, from forced labor during chattel slavery to their overrepresentation and underpayment in modern-day caregiving professions. She discusses the impact of systemic racism and gender discrimination on access to healthcare and support for caregivers, emphasizing the need for policy changes and community support to finally eradicate these disparities. You can read the full interview here.
April also marked Black Maternal Health Week, an annual week of action to close racial inequities in the birthing space founded by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. The week is also intended to celebrate awareness, activism, and community-building by focusing on evidence-based solutions such as midwifery and doula care.
Maven’s Senior Administrator Anjali Sardeshmukh also serves as a doula, and her op-ed from nearly two years ago — in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade — is still as salient today: “Continuing to understand the racist and misogynistic origins of anti-choice movements and centering the voices, solutions, and leadership of those people on the front lines of the maternal health care crisis has never been more important.”
Connected to the issue of equity and birth is the soaring cost of raising children, particularly for Black and brown families. We’ll soon be releasing our Family Sustainability Index, which charts the ways in which California is becoming unsustainable for too many families of color.
In better news, we have so many great minds developing and fighting for equity, including Maven Liberation Health Fellow and newly-minted PhD, Dr. Tiffany Younger. Tiffany successfully defended her thesis on social welfare a few weeks ago — we are so proud of her and can’t wait to see what she does next!
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