NOTICE: All speakers have been finalized and the full list can be found by clicking the agenda tab. We will update speaker information as we receive bios and headshots.

Ansâr El Muhammad is a full spectrum doula, artist, educator and advocate, they value community building, communal wellness, health equity and transgenerational healing. Ansâr became a doula in 2021 after learning about the Black Maternal Mortality rate and understanding a doula’s role in healthy birth outcomes. Ansâr trained in Portland, Oregon under the wings of Tisha West and Jesse Remer. They have filled roles such as director of diversity, equity and inclusion, lead art programs for low income youth of color, served on policy committees for birthers of color, inclusive health and wellness educator in public schools, and recently joined the African American Infant Maternal Mortality prevention initiative (AAIMM) in Los Angeles. As a non-binary person that bears a womb, Ansâr strives to bring nuance, inclusion, and awareness to their practice, and create comfort, warmth and humanization for those they serve.

Christine Parker (she/her) is a Staff Attorney in the LGBTQ, Gender, and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California. She conducts litigation, policy research and advocacy, community education and activist engagement, and media advocacy on the full range of the Project’s issue areas.

Christine was previously a Legal Fellow with the Center for Reproductive Rights’ U.S. Litigation Program. In that role, she helped litigate reproductive rights cases primarily in federal court, including June Medical Services v. Russo at the cert stage and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization during its early rounds. Christine’s other litigation work included cases challenging abortion restrictions promulgated in Texas, in North Dakota, and by the Trump administration.

Christine also previously served as a Staff Attorney at Disability Rights California and a Legal Fellow at ACLU SoCal. In these roles, she advocated for the rights of people with disabilities through impact litigation in state and federal court, legislative analysis and advocacy, and community engagement. Her work spanned a range of issues, including reasonable accommodations, alternatives to conservatorship, and deinstitutionalization.

Christine graduated from the UCLA School of Law with specializations in Public Interest Law and Policy and Critical Race Studies. There, she helped lead numerous student organizations, journals, and clinics dedicated to LGBTQ rights, gender equity, and reproductive justice. While in law school, she interned with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Abortion Federation, and ACLU SoCal.

Christine is a native of Southern California. In her spare time, she volunteers with a kitten rescue group and serves as a Legal Observer with the National Lawyers Guild.

Stevie Merino, MA, IBCLC (she/her) is a diasporic islander born and raised in Long Beach CA, a mom, anthropologist, IBCLC, birthworker, trainer, speaker, and cultural practitioner. Stevie is the Executive Director, and co-founder of the Birthworkers of Color Collective and is the facilitator and trainer of the doula of Color training. Stevie presents and trains around the country on perinatal health disparities, experiences, and traditions of communities of Color with a special focus on lactation, birth, & reproductive justice, working with LGBTQ+ communities, Pacific Islander representation & traditional practices, lactation equity, amongst other topics. As a living arts practitioner, she has curated exhibits highlighting pregnancy, healing, and traditions. Stevie sits on various leadership positions in the community, perinatal/infant health, and academia including the American Anthropology Association as an ombudsperson. She believes this work is advocacy, it is political, and it is essential.

Tecpaxochitl Mireya Gonzalez, MPH, IBCLC is a Purepecha-Nahuatl Indigenous traditional birthworker, perinatal health educator and cultural bearer actively deconstructing western paradigms in public health and creating ancestral frameworks to provide perinatal health and childbirth education, chest/breastfeeding wisdom, birth companionship, perinatal mental health coaching and conscious parenting support to BIPOC families. Weaving Anahuacan Indigenous cosmovision within the perinatal health and first food field, Tecpaxochitl founded Chichihualtia in 2020, an Anahuacan-Indigenous grassroots community health organization providing evidence-based culturally, spiritually and linguistic appropriate childbirth, postpartum care, chest/breastfeeding education, and perinatal health advocacy, promotion and outreach. In her work, Tecpaxochitl advances chest/breastfeeding as a sacred first-food, disruptor of intergenerational traumas, and together with empowered and informed births, a facilitator of lineage-healing and ecological and microbiome resilience.

Molly Mauck, Staff Attorney, joined Public Counsel’s Audrey Irmas Gender Justice Project in 2022. Molly concentrates her practice on employment law, including discrimination and harassment, and Title IX issues, serving low-income workers and students primarily in Southern California. Molly represents clients in administrative proceedings and litigations focusing on employment law and sexual assault/harassment. Molly also works on policy issues related to working families mainly at the California state level. Before joining Public Counsel, Molly was an associate attorney at Romano Law, focusing on employment and business litigation. Additionally, Molly previously served as an Assistant District Attorney for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for several years and held a judicial clerkship with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Molly is a graduate of New York Law School (2016) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013).

Rachel Stein is the Directing Attorney of Public Counsel’s Audrey Irmas Gender Justice Project. Prior to her role as Directing Attorney, she was a Senior Supervising Staff Attorney with Public Counsel’s Children’s Rights Project.

Rachel has been with Public Counsel for many years, initially joining the organization in 2012 as a staff attorney with the Adoptions team in the Children’s Rights Project (CRP) and most recently returning in 2020 to lead the Transition Age Youth (TAY) team in CRP. As the TAY team supervisor, Rachel helped expand the team and she supported the team in providing holistic, trauma-informed legal services to system-impacted youth in the areas of housing, family law, public benefits, traffic tickets, name change petitions, and gender marker correction petitions. Rachel also led the TAY team’s housing policy work. In partnership with community-based coalitions and the office of Supervisor Hilda Solis, Rachel helped secure the passage of a Board of Supervisors’ motion that created contingency plans to help house the 1300 youth who were facing “the Extended Foster Care cliff” as they exited foster care from LA County in December 2021. Rachel has particular expertise in the areas of public benefits and housing for system-impacted youth. Prior to transitioning to public interest work, Rachel practiced employment law, first at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and then at Fox Group Legal (21st Century Fox).

Rachel is both a lawyer and a social worker, having received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2006 and her MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work in 2007. She received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in 2001, and she clerked with the Honorable Cormac J. Carney in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after completing graduate school.

Jasmine Amian (she/her) is the EDucation & Training Manager at the Coalition. She began her journey in education and serving the community as a City Year AmeriCorps student mentor in Los Angeles. Her experience in teaching inspired her to teach abroad for two years in Taiwan. In her role as a learning experience designer at EL Education, she helped educators learn curriculum foundations by crafting supplemental online training. She also built and managed a virtual learning support group within her instructional design academy, fostering community building and knowledge sharing.

Angelica Andrade (she/her/ella) is the Administrative Assistant and Spanish Training Coordinator at the Coalition. During her time at a Public Library in Los Angeles, she became very passionate about community work and providing people with the resources they needed, specifically to individuals who only spoke Spanish. As a Mexican-American, she understands the language barriers the Latinx community faces. Now at the Coalition, Angelica works to raise awareness and utilization of paid leave among the Latinx Community.

TaVia is a community leader and policy advocate; the organization she leads is a backbone for the Antelope Valley AAIMM initiative and a Village fund recipient, engaging community members in community leadership development, community-centered work, and policy advocacy. She is passionate about empowering communities to engage and influence change, inspiring her to show up daily. She is a Weingard John W Mack Fellow and a California Women's Foundation Solis Policy Fellow Alum.

She is a wife and a mom to 5 children. Her free time is spent homeschooling her three youngest children, movie nights with her husband, crafting, being creative, and running around town with her kids to their recreational activities. Her motto is Have the Audacity to Be SEEN.

Natasha Weinstein-Dawes (she/her) is a mother, full-spectrum doula, birth justice advocate and product equity leader. She is a proud Colombian, Jewish-American and first-generation college graduate that has held key roles at companies like Snapchat and Meta, focusing on tech innovation, community building and equitable product development.

Her passion for birth justice and women’s health is fueled by personal experiences and a deep concern over mortality rates for Black birthing people. She believes all individuals should be empowered, safe and supported to birth and feed their children as they choose.

Jennifer Roberson (she/her) is a Certificated Lactation Education Specialist (CLES) and Program Coordinator. She is the Jane of all trades for BreastfeedLA and leads BreastfeedLA’s first initiative to provide

direct lactation services to Black families in L.A. County, coining the Liberation Lactation Lounge- a free clinic in partnership with Humbled By Motherhood to provide a safe space for Black lactation professionals to offer excellent (and FREE!) lactation support to our Black community. She also co-leads our Titties ‘N Tea Baby Café, a drop-in support group where Black lactating folks gather weekly on Zoom and in person to sip on some tea while spilling the tea on all things lactation and raising children. An aspiring IBCLC, Jennifer strives to provide the care and support she had always hoped to receive as a Black woman navigating the healthcare system.