Sevonna Brown, National Director of Black Women’s Blueprint, leads the Safer Childbirth Cities Initiative through Merck for Mothers maternal health portfolio. She is a doula has been featured in the documentary The Business of Birth Control directed by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein as well as Aftershock directed by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt. She is also a recipient of the Mellon Mays fellowship for research on Black maternal health. She has experience leading girls’ initiatives focused on violence intervention and reproductive health. Brown is also a recipient of the Mellon Mays fellowship for my research on Black maternal health. She has expertise and clinical experiences in postpartum support, home visiting, prenatal care and childbirth education for pregnant women. She has worked in integrative health medical offices, nutrition programs, and leads initiatives like mobile health vans. Her expertise spans across continuity of care, home birth, birth centers and maternal-fetal medicine. She sits on the Respectful Maternal Care Council organized by White Ribbon Alliance. She has trained midwives and doulas at colleges and university, schools of nursing and within birth center settings on platforms such as CVS, minute clinics and insurance companies such as Aetna. She has written numerous op/eds and published articles in Ebony, TIME Magazine, ForHarriet, and Rewire News on issues of reproductive and maternal health. She is certified in the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI®), the premier cross-cultural assessment of intercultural competence that is used by thousands of individuals and organizations to build intercultural competence to achieve international and domestic diversity and inclusion goals and outcomes. In this way, she has the expertise and drive to serve as Multiple Principal Investigator (MPI) for the proposed community and academic partnership entitled “NY- CHAMP” and look forward to working together, along with the NIH’s Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence, in providing the best obstetrical care possible in New York State.
She is also a recipient of the Mellon Mays fellowship for her research on Black maternal health. At Black Women’s Blueprint she oversees advocacy campaigns, co-chairing the NYC4CEDAW, addressing localized efforts to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. She has provided training and technical assistance to a number of organizations through the Institute for Gender and Culture (IGC) including but not limited to: Jackson State University, Tougaloo College, Florida Memorial University, Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault (LaFASA), the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Assault. Sevonna Brown is certified in the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI®),the premier cross-cultural assessment of intercultural competence that is used by thousands of individuals and organizations to build intercultural competence to achieve international and domestic diversity and inclusion goals and outcomes.
