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Sankofa Visionary Speaker Series is Back!!

  • Jun 26
  • 2 min read

Join us for our upcoming Indigo Visionary Speaker Series

August 26, 2026 from 10-11:30 a.m. PDT



Workshop title: She Who Whispers: Ancestral Knowing as Clinical Method — and the Policy That Decides Whose Knowing Is Real


Workshop Description: What if the practices our field files under "complementary" are not adjuncts to the intervention but the intervention itself? This session treats ancestral and spiritual knowing as clinical method — not metaphor, not enrichment, but the working mechanism of culturally affirming perinatal care. Participants move through a wholistic continuum of care — bone closing ceremonies, postpartum rest and meal delivery, full-spectrum doula support, perinatal massage and pelvic floor care — and consider how birthworkers can be trained through reflective practice, pilgrimage, and lineage rather than through clinical protocol alone.


From there, the session turns to the question the field rarely says out loud: policy is where we write down what we believe is real. Every reimbursement code, every definition of "evidence," every credential is a quiet decision about whose knowledge counts — with money attached. Ancestral practice and policy translation are revealed as one continuous motion, not two separate jobs. The provocation is total but unhurried: a field organized around the evidence base has been systematically discarding the very practices that produce trust, safety, and thriving — and the codes, definitions, and metrics that govern our work decide whether those practices survive the generation. Participants leave with a reframed question — not how do we make our care more culturally competent, but what forms of knowing have we been trained to dismiss, and what would it take to write them into the systems we steward.


Speaker Bio: Markita Barideaux, LCSW, is Director of Behavioral Health for EMBRACE: Perinatal Integrated Care in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF, where she has spent 15+ years transforming culturally responsive care across the perinatal period and early childhood. A co-founder of EMBRACE and a national Child-Parent Psychotherapy trainer, she designs care ecosystems that braid clinical rigor with ancestral and community wisdom. She is the architect of the Safe Passage Care-to-Policy Translation Model and a 2020 Zero To Three Emerging Leader. Her work insists that the practices our field has been trained to dismiss are often the ones that heal.



If live Spanish interpretation would support your full engagement, we ask that you request this on the registration page prior to August 21st.


PS- the event will not be recorded.



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