Rest. Resist. Renew: Sustaining Black Health Leadership in Demanding Times
How do we lead Black health and justice organizations in systems shaped by inequity without sacrificing our own bodies, families, or spirit? This workshop offers a strategic pause to reimagine rest, boundaries, and collective care as essential leadership practices, not indulgences.
Black health leaders carry multiple responsibilities: community needs, institutional accountability, funding pressures, and the weight of structural racism. For Black women in particular, leadership often includes invisible emotional labor, caretaking expectations, crisis containment, and the unspoken demand to be both strong and endlessly available. Too often, sustainability is treated as secondary to urgency.
This workshop creates space to name the invisible load, disrupt urgency culture, and reclaim rest and collective care as acts of strategy and resistance. Together, we’ll explore how to build leadership rhythms that protect our wellbeing while strengthening organizational impact.
This is not about doing less. It’s about leading differently. Because health equity requires healthy Black leaders.
Facilitator: Chinyere Oparah, PhD, is a scholar-activist, health equity leader, and executive coach committed to advancing Black maternal health and justice. She is co-founder of Black Women Birthing Justice (BWBJ), a national organization working to transform maternal health systems through policy advocacy, research, and community-led change. A widely published author and editor, her books include Birthing Justice and Battling Over Birth, foundational texts in reproductive justice and maternal health equity.
Chinyere brings senior leadership experience across higher education and nonprofit governance. She is the founder of the Center for Liberated Leadership (C4LL), where she supports equity-focused leaders navigating complexity, institutional pressure, and transition.
