Our Team

 Kellee Coleman has over 20 years of social justice training and community organizing experience integrating media, and popular education as strategies for social change. She has conducted original research on the social determinants of health as they impact Black women locally. Kellee co-founded Vibrant Woman/Mama Sana prenatal clinic, which provides holistic and culturally specific prenatal care, birth companions, midwifery services, prenatal fitness and nutrition services to lower income Black and Latinx folks in the Austin area. Kellee was an Inaugural Community Strategy Team Member for the Dell Medical School Population Health Department which provides critical feedback on initiatives before they are implemented in the community and works to keep the department accountable to its mission. She built a maternal and infant outcome improvement program at the local health department where she recruited and engaged community stakeholders to lower the infant mortality rate for African American women in the county and trained community health workers on race and reproduction, community organizing strategies, and service coordination. She has consulted with numerous national and local organizations on equity and reproductive issues including the U.S. Midwifery Education Regulation Association, the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the Dell Medical School. She works at the Equity Office for the City of Austin and continues to work in municipal government in Texas leading work on racial equity.  

Chilean-born community organizer, licensed midwife, and social justice trainer Paula X. Rojas grew up in Houston and followed in the footsteps of family members in Chile to begin working on social justice issues affecting her local community as a teen. She spent formative years as a youth back in Chile learning from grassroots revolutionary movements taking down the military dictatorship. For the last 32 years, she has organized at the intersection of class, race and gender to build collective people power in her local community, experimenting with different forms of grassroots organizations.

Paula has worked on issues of gender violence, racial justice, reproductive justice, childcare and health care access, worker’s rights and community alternatives to policing. She co-founded various community-based organizations including Sista II Sista, Pachamama, Mamas of Color Rising, Mama Sana Vibrant Woman, Refugio: Center for Community Organizing, and the New York Organizing Support Center. She has also played a key role in supporting and amplifying local organizing work including providing training and technical assistance to the local chapters and affiliates of INCITE! (Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence). Over the last 15 years in Texas, she has supported the training and development of community organizers and their organizations working on a range of social justice issues.

In 2014 Rojas was licensed as a midwife while developing a model to practice a vision for a just and loving approach to pregnancy, birth and new parenthood for poor and working class BIPOC families. The MJM model integrates the midwifery model of care and racial justice organizing, with an understanding of the social determinants of health using a popular education methodology. She spent almost a decade working as a licensed midwife with Mama Sana-Vibrant Woman in order to put a more equitable maternal health model into practice in Austin, TX.

Paula is currently active with INCITE! and is a contributor to the INCITE! collections: The Color of Violence and The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Paula co-authored the report by the National Perinatal Taskforce: Building a Movement to Birth a More Just and Loving World with national recommendations for improving the racial maternal and infant health inequities. She continues to work as a consultant/trainer for Embody Transformation supporting organizations locally and nationally. In that capacity she served as Community Equity Strategy Consultant for the Dell Medical School at UT Austin. 

In 2020, Rojas served as co-chair of the Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce of the City of Austin, a process that culminated after years of local volunteer organizing with Communities of Color United for Racial Justice (CCU) working to divest public funds from policing and invest in the local People's Budget recommendations including community health equity projects. From 2021-2023 Paula served as the Director of Organizing and Movement Building for the National Perinatal Taskforce. She is currently facilitating work at the intersection of Birthing Justice and Abolition. 

Andrea Black works as a consultant supporting social justice advocates, organizers, and foundations with facilitation, grantmaking, program development, research, and evaluation projects. Andrea has over twenty years of field experience in immigration and criminal justice issues, working in a range of capacities including program development, public education, advocacy, communications, facilitation, fundraising and movement building. Andrea received a B.A. in history from Harvard-Radcliffe University and is a graduate of New York University Law School. Andrea is the recipient of fellowships from the Open Society Institute, Equal Justice Works, and the Next Generation Leadership program of the Rockefeller Foundation. Andrea lives in Austin, Texas where she is a member of the City of Austin’s Equity Action Team and Undoing White Supremacy Austin, a volunteer group working towards racial equity in Austin. In 2020-2021, Andrea participated in the Austin Police Department Video Community Review Panel and Community Equity Reinvestment Working Group of the Austin Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.