Across both sessions of the Power Shifting in SRHR webinar series, one idea kept returning: that power shifting is not a policy statement, it’s a practice, built daily through who leads, who is trusted, and whose knowledge counts. Few careers in the SRHR field embody that practice as directly as that of Dr. Joia Crear-Perry. As founder and President of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, she has spent decades naming racism as a root cause of health inequities rather than a side effect of it, and building the community-led infrastructure to address that root cause directly.
Dr. Joia Crear-Perry: a career built at the intersection of medicine and justice
Dr. Crear-Perry’s path into this work runs through both the clinic and the community. After undergraduate studies at Princeton University and Xavier University, she earned her MD from Louisiana State University and completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Tulane University’s School of Medicine. She went on to serve as director of women’s and children’s services at Jefferson Community Healthcare Center and as director of clinical services for the City of New Orleans Health Department, work that placed her squarely inside the systems she would later spend her career challenging. She currently serves as an adjunct professor at Tulane School of Public Health, and previously led the Birthing Project as executive director.
That grounding in frontline healthcare delivery, paired with a research and policy lens, is part of what makes her advocacy distinct. Her work sits at the intersection of reproductive justice, intersectionality, and reproductive health, advanced through research, training, and what she describes as community-led collaboration and culture shift. It’s a framing that echoes what practitioners across the Power Shifting webinar series described: that lasting change requires more than better programs. It requires shifting who holds the authority to define the problem in the first place.
Dr. Crear-Perry’s influence extends well beyond the clinic and the classroom. She has twice addressed the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, pressing for a human rights framework to address maternal mortality and elevating the cause of gender diversity on that global stage. In 2020, USA Today named her to its “Women of the Century” series, and she was featured on ABC Nightline’s “Hear Her Voice.” Her insights have appeared in national and international publications including Essence and Ms. magazine, and she remains a sought-after trainer and speaker on health equity.
On power, named plainly
Asked to reflect on power shifting in her own context, Dr. Crear-Perry doesn’t soften the framing. “White Supremacy, Patriarchy and Religious Fundamentalism have been the framework for how power is wielded in the USA since the original Colonizers stole land and human beings,” she says. “These frameworks have gotten us to the place that we are today as a nation being led by a White Supremacist Fascist. We will not survive as a nation until we shift the power back to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities that built this country and ensure all people are protected and supported.”
It’s a direct statement, and a fitting one for a subcommittee built around interrogating power rather than describing it politely. It also reflects the throughline of the webinar series itself: that power shifting is not primarily about seats at a table, but about who sets the agenda, who controls resources, and who is trusted to know what their own community needs. For Dr. Crear-Perry, that work starts with naming the systems that concentrate power in the first place, and then building the alternative.
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This is the first in a series of member spotlights from the Power Shifting Subcommittee, drawing on the themes raised throughout the 2026 Power Shifting in SRHR webinar series.
