We All Rise Featured in National Report on Community-Rooted Maternal Mental Health
New Maternal Mental Health Equity Fund report highlights lessons from We All Rise and six community-rooted organizations working to transform maternal mental health care for BIPOC families.
We All Rise: African American Resource Center is proud to be featured in a new national report from the Maternal Mental Health Equity Fund (MMHEF), Community-Rooted Maternal Mental Health: Creating Trusted Care for Families.
Released September 16, 2026, the report brings together lessons from seven community-based organizations across the country working to address maternal mental health inequities in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
We All Rise was selected alongside Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services in Washington, Our Roots in California, Perinatal Health Equity Initiative in New Jersey, Todos Juntos Learning Center in Texas, Valley Settlement in Colorado, and Village of Healing in Ohio. The seven organizations were selected from nearly 150 applicants to participate in a four-year MMHEF cohort launched in 2024.
Maternal Mental Health Is Connected to the Whole of a Family's Life
The report begins from an important reality: maternal mental health cannot be separated from the conditions surrounding a family.
Mental health needs can affect birth outcomes, relationships between parents and children, and family stability. At the same time, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other women of color experience significant inequities in both maternal mental health and access to care.
For We All Rise, that interconnectedness is fundamental to how we understand care.
A person may walk through our doors because they need help with housing, food, transportation, safety, advocacy, or another immediate need. Those experiences are not separate from mental health and well-being. Building trust and addressing the realities affecting someone's everyday life can create a pathway to deeper support when it is wanted or needed.
As the report concludes, maternal mental health is inseparable from the trust, culture, and economic stability shaping a family's everyday life.
What Community-Rooted Care Looks Like at We All Rise
The report highlights We All Rise's approach at multiple points.
It describes our work in Wisconsin as supporting survivors through a community-driven mental health resource center that includes group support and individualized clinical services. It also identifies We All Rise as providing culturally specific crisis response, therapy, and care navigation within a broader system of support.
The report also highlights our Sacred Kinship Maternal Healing Model, including its integration of cultural, clinical, and community practices.
That model recognizes that strong maternal mental health care requires more than making clinical services available. It requires culturally grounded staff, strong relationships, support for the people providing care, and access to clinical expertise when needs intensify.
As We All Rise shared in the report:
“We create the conditions necessary for Black survivors to feel safe — to feel seen, heard, and recognized, and less erased.”
That trust matters because families should not have to navigate disconnected systems or repeatedly prove that they deserve support before receiving care.
Five Lessons for Organizations Serving Families
Across seven very different communities and models, the report identifies five lessons for organizations working to integrate maternal mental health into their work:
Community-anchored trust is the foundation of maternal mental health intervention.
A community-rooted workforce and ongoing staff support are core to maternal mental health care.
Maternal mental health integration works best when it is flexible, family-driven, and able to navigate multi-system complexity.
Intentional investment in organizational capacity enables community-based maternal mental health care.
Community-driven measurement leads to better outcomes in community-based programs.
Together, these lessons challenge the idea that maternal mental health care has to begin—or end—inside a traditional clinical setting.
Instead, prevention, early support, clinical intervention, crisis response, navigation, advocacy, economic stability, culturally grounded relationships, and community connection can all be part of supporting maternal mental health.
Trust Is Part of the Care
One of the clearest themes across the report is that trust is not an extra feature added to care after services have been designed. Trust is part of what makes care possible.
Families need the flexibility to enter, pause, and return to support at their own pace. Organizations need strong referral and partnership networks so that people can reach more intensive care without having to navigate complex systems alone. And the people providing care need training, supervision, clinical consultation, and organizational infrastructure that allow those relationships to endure.
That understanding is deeply aligned with how We All Rise has grown our work: starting with the person and family in front of us, recognizing the realities surrounding their lives, and building from relationships rather than expecting people to fit themselves into a predetermined system.
A National Learning Community, Rooted in Local Communities
We are grateful to the Maternal Mental Health Equity Fund, its funding partners, and the six organizations learning alongside us.
We are especially grateful to the families, survivors, community members, staff, and partners whose experiences continue to shape what care looks like at We All Rise.
This report is not simply about seven programs. It asks a larger question of the maternal mental health field: What becomes possible when we invest in organizations that communities already know and trust?
The lessons emerging from this national cohort reinforce what our community continues to teach us here in Green Bay: culturally rooted, relationship-driven care belongs at the center—not the margins—of the systems designed to support families.
💜 Read the full report:Community-Rooted Maternal Mental Health: Creating Trusted Care for Families
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