EP 001: A Path Forward With the National Women’s Health Network

---

Our first panelist, Byllye Y. Avery, is a health care activist, past board member of the NWHN, and founder of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the first national organization to specialize in Black women’s reproductive health issues. A proponent of reproductive justice, Byllye Avery has worked to develop health care services and education that address Black women’s mental and physical health. Byllye has received the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellowship for Social Contribution and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the Advancement of Health Care from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among many other awards.   

Byllye has been participating in consciousness raising groups and abortion access activities since the early 1970s. In response to the lack of access to abortion and other reproductive health needs that low-income Black women faced in her community, Byllye and her colleagues opened the Gainesville Women’s Health Center in 1974. It was the first abortion and gynecological care clinic in the city, opening after a petition to start a Planned Parenthood clinic in Gainesville was denied.  
 
She has advocated alongside other prominent African American leaders such as Shirley Chisholm, Maxine Waters, Dorothy Height, and Faye Wattleton. Together, they issued and signed a public statement, “We Remember: African American Women for Reproductive Freedom” in 1989.   

In the intervening decades, Byllye has won numerous awards, published multiple works on public health, served in advisory role for the Office of Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health, served as visiting fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and received honorary degrees from six colleges and universities.  Let’s get a round of applause for Byllye.  

Our second panelist, Cynthia Gutierrez (she/ella) is an award winning first-generation Nicaraguan Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, full spectrum doula, cultural strategist, writer, and public speaker. Her work looks at the intersection of reproductive justice, the criminal injustice system, disability justice, and environmental justice.   

Cynthia was a graduate of the 2021 Rockwood Leadership Institute Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice cohort. Cynthia‘s work has been featured in the New York Times, The Lily News, Elle Magazine, Parents Latina, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rewire News Group, and other widely read publications.   

She is currently the program manager for the University of California San Francisco Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health (HIVE) and Team Lily programs. Cynthia is a proud abortion storyteller with We Testify. She is on the Board of Directors for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom, and Women’s Voices for the Earth.    

She has a Bachelors in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Cynthia is originally from San Francisco’s Excelsior District and now resides in East Oakland with her husband and son. Round of applause for Cynthia.  

And last but not least, Rachel Branaman (she/her) is the founder and principal consultant of Talem Consulting, a national, full-service diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ), woman-owned firm which provides nonprofits the tools they need to build capacity, fundraise, and dismantle systems of inequity. Her work provides an intersectional and equity-based framework to ensure the communities being served are centered in the work nonprofits do.    

Rachel has 20 years of nonprofit experience. She has worked as a Community Development Advisor for the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia for the U.S. Peace Corps. She also served as Executive Director for Alley’s House, an organization providing education and social services to teenaged mothers; and Consultant for health care organizations such as Urban Health Plan in New York, Immunize DC, Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation, among others. She is currently a vaccine activist on a monthly Radio Azad show and is an advocate on DC’s Capitol Hill meeting with legislators on issues ranging from the Affordable Care Act, Bans off our Bodies movement, Menstrual Equity for All Act, and the Sam Farr and Nick Castle Peace Corps Reform Act.   

She is currently NWHN’s interim director of development and serves as a board member for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and Association of Philanthropic Council. She has a Bachelors in French from Austin College in Sherman, Texas and a Master’s in Nonprofit Management from Regis University.