The SHALON Method™
A Community-Centered Approach to Advancing Black Maternal Health
The SHALON Method™ is our community-centered framework designed to advance Black maternal health. It brings together several key initiatives—including the SHALON Blueprint™, the GRAMMS support program, and our CommuniTEA™ series—into a unified approach focused on education, healing, and advocacy.
Core Initiatives
SHALON Blueprint™: Anti-Bias & Cultural Humility Training
A research-informed training program built for healthcare providers, social workers, and allied professionals.
Focus: Uncovering and addressing implicit bias, systemic inequities, and structural racism
Tools: Self-assessment via the Mirror Exercise, case-based learning, and reflective dialogue
Goal: Equip professionals with actionable skills to see patients as people first and build trust
A healing-centered gathering that brings together families, advocates, providers, and policymakers.
Purpose: Reimagine maternal health through conversation, connection, and collective visioning
Audience: Intergenerational; includes youth, elders, and the broader community
Offerings: Story-sharing, healing spaces, policy dialogue, and resource mobilization
GRAMMS™: Grandmothers Rallying Against Maternal Mortality Sisterhood
A healing-centered program for women who have lost daughters, sisters, or loved ones to pregnancy-related complications. GRAMMS™ offers space for connection, resilience, and action—rooted in sisterhood and grounded in justice.
Support
Culturally attuned emotional wellness resources, peer support circles, and monthly workshops designed to honor grief and foster healing.
Education
Practical tools and expert-led sessions on legal preparedness, parenting after loss, and how to navigate systems with confidence and clarity.
Advocacy
Equipping women to become storytellers, truth-tellers, and system-changers—elevating lived experiences to reshape maternal health outcomes for generations to come.
Community-Based Research and Evaluation
In partnership with academic institutions, DSMAP ensures that community voices shape and assess all SHALON Method™ activities.
Approach: Trauma-informed, equity-centered, participatory
Framework: Based on Alinsky’s theory of change
Objective: Measure the impact and refine interventions without making participants feel like test subjects
What Makes the SHALON Method™ Different
Built by and for Black women and families
Integrates grief work, healing, research, and advocacy
We don’t pathologize pain or criminalize survival. We humanize it and organize around it.