EVENTS: Learn With Us Screenings
Women’s Foundation of the South (WFS) launched its evocative Learn with Us series in 2022, adding more episodes and topics in 2023.
WFS’s Learn with Us series was launched in 2022; it includes four moving and eye-opening episodes of 30-minute videos featuring womxn of color speaking about their particular experiences and telling compelling stories that illustrate these events.
The first episode debuted on Mother’s Day, 2022, and the timing of the debut – on Mother’s Day, May 8 – was intentional. We invite you to watch all four 2022 Learn with Us episodes below – please learn with us and partner with us to shift the South.
WFS’s Learn with Us series amplifies the Foundation’s vision of a flourishing South, where womxn and girls of color are healthy, doing well financially, and able to determine their own destinies, ensuring that they and their families thrive.
Learn with Us is an impact production, telling the stories of womxn and girls of color in the South, and rooted in content that showcases conditions and issues that womxn and girls face in the country’s Southern states.
The first episode concerns the specific experiences womxn of color have when it comes to maternal health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, and reproductive justice in Southern states, particularly Louisiana. Four panelists speak about their own experience of birthing while black as well as birth workers in Louisiana, and the discussion is moderated by WFS Founding President and CEO Carmen James Randolph. This is a don’t-miss debut episode that changes the way people think about maternal mortality and health, leaving them with the clear understanding that outcomes concerning maternal mortality are so much worse in Southern states for womxn of color than elsewhere in our country.
The topic of maternal mortality is especially impassioned and of-the-moment given Senator Bill Cassidy’s (R-La.) controversial comments to Politico in May 2022 that Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate — one of the worst in the nation — does not tell the whole story of maternal health in the state because of its large Black population. His comments underscore how it is possible for Black womxn to be systemically unseen, unheard, disbelieved, and dismissed by healthcare professionals and even elected officials in Louisiana.
So if you correct our population for race, we're not as much of an outlier as it'd otherwise appear.
The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate among developed nations. Each year, approximately 17 mothers die for every 100,000 pregnancies in the country, with rates much more common among Black womxn than other racial groups. In Louisiana, maternal mortality for Black womxn is four times that of White womxn. WFS’s Learn with Us series is particularly eye-opening in light of Sen. Cassidy’s statement.
Watch the 2022 Learn with Us Episodes
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