Instructor-Led Confronting Structural Racism Through the Lens of Maternal Health

Held February 26, 2025 via Zoom

1 pm - 4 pm CST (3 Cultural Competency CEUs)

This 3-hour interactive training is designed to develop structural competence about maternal health by giving clinical and macro social workers the ability to recognize the structural links that influence maternal morbidity and mortality, reflect on their own positionality and social work's complicity in systems of oppression, and take concrete actions to dismantle oppressive systems that perpetuate maternal health inequities. Participants will be encouraged to share challenges and seek guidance about the capacity of social workers to activate positive change in maternal health outcomes.

Upon concluding this course, participants will be able to:

• Examine historical and current trends of exclusion and oppression that have adversely impacted maternal morbidity and mortality rates among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
• Demonstrate critical reflection and self-awareness of one’s own positionality, social location, power, and privilege.
• Identify and describe leverage points in which structural barriers to maternal health equity and well-being can be dismantled.
• Critically examine the contradictory role of social workers in both challenging and perpetuating systems that contribute to poor maternal health outcomes.
• Contribute to social work-informed practice, policy, or advocacy that aims to disrupt part of a system the participant identifies as oppressive or discriminatory

Priscilla Kennedy, PhD, LMSW, received her PhD and MSW from the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her research agenda is informed by several years in community social work, specifically in developing community health interventions that address structural determinants of health. She is particularly interested in examining conceptual frameworks for social work education that integrate critical, engaged, and abolitionist pedagogies to cultivate students’ knowledge of structural racism and agency to act on dismantling oppressive systems.