Rachel serves as the Program Coordinator and Doula Supervisor for the GREAT Start Prevention Initiative program at the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Family and Consumer Sciences with a concentration in Family Services and a Master's in Human Services Program Administration from Eastern Illinois University. Her background includes roles as an Infant and Family Support Specialist, Home Visitor, Logistics Coordinator for a four-county Mobile Crisis Response team, Medicaid Care Coordinator for children with behavioral and mental health needs, and Crisis Advocate and Lead Children’s Specialist at Crisis Nursery.

Rachel has fourteen years of experience supporting children and families in Champaign County. Rachel is also a Certified Lactation Counselor, Certified Family Support Professional, and Infant Sleep Consulting Professional. Rachel is a mother of two who is passionate about supporting families as they build confidence and connection in their parenting journey.

Lourdes' lived experience as an immigrant has informed her approach towards reproductive justice and health equity. She has been a community advocate, grassroots organizer and leader working on immigration issues for over 22 years. She has been a founder of Mamas of Color Rising and Mama Sana Vibrant Woman (MSVW): organizations dedicated to reproductive justice and immigration rights. Lourdes is trained as a birth companion, helping others like her who were isolated, pregnant and seeking connection and resources.

Lourdes has served as Program Director and Program Coordinator for MSVW's Spanish-speaking community, where she does exceptional bilingual programming for families seeking perinatal education and resources. She is also an entrepreneur and the founder of a thriving catering business which provides holistic, culturally specific fresh foods to community and institutional organizations. In this role, she trains and empowers women in her community in food industry entrepreneurship. Lourdes is a board member of La Aldea, an organization which prevents and supports survivors of domestic violence.

Angelica Martinez, PhD, is an academic researcher and educator whose work examines the construction of motherhood identity at the intersections of platform capitalism, care labor, and FemTech. She holds a doctorate in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications from the University of Texas at Dallas and serves as Adjunct Faculty at UTD and Dallas College, teaching courses on visual culture, design, and transnational film. Beyond the classroom, she is the Speaker Series Coordinator for the Labor Tech Research Network.

Jeanette is a full-spectrum caregiver, doula and pleasure and playfully oriented microscale organizer from South Austin, Texas. She specializes in neighboring, event planning support, quixotic pranking for justice, funerary and grief support, dental and elder care, officiating friendship ceremonies, finding lost items and goth proclivities. She enjoys playing and working in the astrogelateria, the charcuteria, growing and tending wild hairs, and cultivating and decolonizing cheese cults, including the one she is active in-Cheese Coven.

She is a co-founder of Yo Mama's Catering Cooperative, Mamas of Color Rising and Mama Sana Vibrant Woman (MSVW). Jeanette’s organizing and early life work was centered on supporting people through loss & life. Her work in reproductive justice started with a focus on abortion access and loss support. It later blossomed to include birth, postpartum and newborn care. Her lived experience as a working-class mother of two, with multiple jobs to make ends meet was challenging, transformational and incited her to explore alternatives and join and build intentional communities. It also showed her the value & interdependence of care work in reproductive justice and in her community, highlighting how underpaid & undervalued parenting and exploitative and extractive the work of caregiving is in Texas.

Jeanette hopes to bring a post-capitalist and anti racist vision to the various community roles she embodies. As her children have grown and parenting responsibilities shifted, she studied and practiced organizational coaching, and solidarity economies through a Next Economy MBA and has since supported four collectives through the development and formation into alternatives to ‘business as usual’ for non profit and for profit organizations. She also studied astroherbalism and astrology with Meira Epstein and Oak School of Astrology, and ice cream making 101 at Penn state.

Dr. Raj is an Assistant Professor in Health and Kinesiology, College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, Ann Arbor in Health Management and Policy. Dr. Raj directs the Aging, Caregiving, and Technology lab where she studies how our health care system can better serve the needs, concerns, and preferences of patients and their family caregivers, how technologies may support caregivers in supporting their care recipients, and informs the development of health technologies and policies that are effective and promote health equity.

Charanya is a leading international art educator with over a decade of experience in the field. As a multimedia artist and educator, she has led several innovative projects and was awarded the Fulbright scholarship for Arts and Cultural Management. She holds a dual degree with a Masters in Art Education and Community Practice from New York University as well as a Masters in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India.

She has played key leadership roles in civil society and non-profit organizations and was on the board of Yakshi Resource and Creativity Center for Rural Children and Youth. Her work also involved organizing for food sovereignty, resource rights and social justice. She also collaborated with traditional artisans, visual artists and musicians to develop unique educational modules for children and youth.

Charanya is deeply passionate about the power of art in transforming lives and is currently the Director of Community Engagement at the Louis Armstrong House Museum. She is committed to enhancing community engagement, developing creative pedagogy and leading the educational initiatives at the museum; that draw from the transformative elements of jazz, the civil rights movement, the archives and oral histories rooted in radical hope and imagination.

Lisa Rohleder, L.Ac., is a Portland, Oregon–based acupuncturist and social entrepreneur best known for pioneering the community acupuncture movement, an approach that provides affordable, high-volume care by treating multiple patients in shared spaces. She is a co-founder of Working Class Acupuncture and The Oregon College of Community Acupuncture (ORCCA), a school dedicated to low-cost education and training practitioners in community-based acupuncture practice.

Rohleder’s work is grounded in a strong commitment to social justice and expanding access to care, particularly for low-income communities. She has been a leading advocate for reducing financial barriers in healthcare, emphasizing practical, accessible treatment over expensive, individualized models. Her ideas and experiences are documented in her book Fractal: About Community Acupuncture, where she outlines the philosophy and impact of this approach.

In addition to her clinical and educational work, Rohleder writes and speaks extensively about acupuncture safety and the profession’s intersection with broader social and economic issues. Through her Substack writing, she continues to engage critically with the field, advocating for ethical, accessible, and community-centered care.