#UMNMCH student Dion Lok (MPH/MSW 2026) wrote this reflection on their deployment with the Minnesota Department of Health’s Innovations for Maternal Health Outcomes in Minnesota program and how the work is shaping their commitment to reproductive justice and perinatal equity for Black families.

I-MOM and the Perinatal Sub-Committee: Where My Deployment Lives

I have had the honor of joining the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Section of the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) as an intern supporting Innovations for Maternal Health Outcomes in Minnesota (I-MOM). Funded by a five-year Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) award for supporting state-led maternal health innovation, I-MOM works to align and strengthen data-driven, community-informed perinatal health programming for the communities experiencing the highest rates of disparities in Minnesota: Black, American Indian, other communities of color, immigrants, refugees, and rural residents. My deployment sits within the Perinatal Sub-Committee, the body responsible for the Perinatal Health Strategic Plan released in early 2026, which lays out recommendations to improve perinatal outcomes for Black, American Indian and Indigenous, and rural communities across the state. Being embedded in this structure has given me a front-row seat to how a state health department translates a federal grant into programming that is genuinely shaped by the communities it is meant to serve, rather than designed around them. It has also shown me how much coordination it takes behind the scenes, aligning committee priorities, community voice and data infrastructure before a single innovation ever reaches a birthing person.

Centering the Black Community Action Team

Within that structure, I work directly with the Black Community Action Team (BCAT), one of the community-driven groups charged with transforming the Strategic Plan’s recommendations into action for Black birthing people and their families. My focus has been on advancing perinatal equity by helping build a historical trauma acknowledgment that names how Minnesota’s health systems have contributed to harm against Black birthing people, past and present, and that sets a foundation for accountability and repair. Alongside that document, I have been advocating for greater Black representation across perinatal spaces, such as doulas whose lived experience mirrors the families they support. These training curricula reflect Black perspectives rather than treating them as an afterthought, and they train community health workers who can build trust in ways that clinical staff alone often cannot. Underneath all of this sits my research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and how it manifests in Black bodies during the perinatal period in Minnesota. This connection is too often overlooked or misread by providers as noncompliance, difficulty or high-risk behavior, rather than understood as a physiological and psychological response to sustained intergenerational harm. Making that link visible, and giving providers language for it, is central to the BCAT’s larger goal of having perinatal systems that recognize historical trauma as a determinant of health and respond to Black families with dignity rather than suspicion.

How the Work Comes Together

Much of this work has moved through cycles of listening, drafting and returning to the BCAT for feedback before anything is considered final. The historical trauma acknowledgment started as a review of existing acknowledgments from other state and institutional efforts, followed by conversations with Action Team members about what language felt honest versus performative, and several rounds of revision to get the tone right. The C-PTSD research brief has followed a similar arc of literature review, synthesis of how trauma-informed care frameworks do and do not account for the perinatal period and check-ins with the BCAT to make sure the findings reflect what community members actually experience. The decriminalized language process grew directly out of both of those efforts, once it became clear how much of the language embedded in existing institutional materials, from intake forms to provider notes, carries forward assumptions rooted in that same history of harm. None of this work has moved in isolation, as the draft is shaped by the people it is meant to serve before it goes anywhere near a wider audience.

Products and Partners

This work has produced, and continues to produce, tools meant to live beyond my deployment. I am contributing to a historical trauma acknowledgment for use across MDH perinatal programming, a research brief on C-PTSD and its impact on Black birthing people in Minnesota, and a person-centered, decriminalized language handout designed to help institutions repair language that has historically been used to pathologize and criminalize Black bodies in clinical and public health settings. This work is only possible in partnership with the Black Community Action Team, the broader Perinatal Sub-Committee, and the alignment efforts connecting the Minnesota Perinatal Quality Collaborative, the Maternal and Child Health Advisory Task Force and the Maternal Mortality Review Committee under a shared Title V vision for perinatal health. I hope that these products outlast my time in this role, giving MDH and its partners concrete tools to keep pulling the system toward one that names harm honestly, makes room for Black expertise and treats trauma as a legitimate part of perinatal care rather than a statistic. 

BIO 

Dion Lok is a 2026 dual-degree graduate of the maternal and child health MPH program and the MSW program at the University of Minnesota. They received their Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a minor in Ethnic Studies from Metro State in 2024. 

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