Uzazi Village is a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating maternal and infant health inequity among Black and Brown communities. Through education, support, and advocacy, Uzazi Village works to improve perinatal health in the Kansas City community and nationwide. We work every day to build a respectful and supportive healthcare system that fosters equitable and sustainable outcomes in maternal and infant health.
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+1 (816) 541-3718
Who We Are
Healthy Baby. Healthy Family. Healthy Village.
We Believe That:
Our Values
Integrity is a hallmark of how we move in healthcare, health advocacy, and health policy. We will be true first and foremost to our own ideals of accountability and responsibility to ourselves and our community. We will move in truth, with transparency, vulnerability, and authenticity. We will be who we are, no more, no less, because who we are deserves excellence in all that we say and do.
Transformative justice is a value that demands change for the better. Our justice in healthcare is long overdue. We cannot depend on a system that was designed to either ignore us or discount us. We will settle for neither. We will create our own just systems while we fight to dismantle unjust ones.
Black liberation means we will take up space and provide safe adjacent systems for our perinatal clients, staff, and community members. We understand the complexities of the Black lived experience and offer services, programs, and care models that are culturally specific and congruent with it. We value freedom from racism and white supremacy in clinical care and health policy and offer our clients autonomy for their own self-determination.
“For us, by us” is our rallying cry for liberation.
Healing is a core value that allows us to focus not only on the many harms that have been done to us historically and continue to be done today, ranging from the interpersonal to the systemic, for one cannot solve a problem one does not acknowledge. We want to go beyond focusing on the harms to a focus on self-healing from the outer body to the inner soul. This healing is not contingent on the actions or acknowledgments of the perpetrators of harm, but on our own relationship to ourselves.
We will set our boundaries, create relationships based on earned trust, protect our own spaces and focus on relational rather than transactional health care delivery. We will uplift self-care and community care and be scrupulous in our pursuit of a balanced, healthy life across all quadrants of the lived experience.
Cultural congruency defines care that aligns with cultural knowing and celebrates our heritage and identity as people of the Black diaspora. For too long, our culture and ways of being have been defined by others as deficiency-based or substandard. We reject all mischaracterizations of who we are and embrace the legacy of strength and dignity that our ancestors built for us. We are survivors of a 400-year smear campaign standing to say “NO MORE.” We will tell our own stories and define for ourselves who and what we are. We will create care models that fit us and elevate our way of life and health.
