What is the Asante Warrior Project?The Asante Warrior Project is an academic, multimedia vehicle to raise awareness of, and build an intervention for the Black Maternal Health Crisis. The podcast shares the narratives of Black women’s experiences with childbirth (both as birth givers and birth workers) to discern what empirical data and common factors exist and can lead to intervention plans. The Asante Warrior Project is also building a web and mobile app intervention for the sharing of knowledge. The purpose of the Asante Warrior Project is to humanize the maternal mortality data with narratives and visuals, connect the narratives with the greater diaspora, create a successful intervention informed and inspired by Black women that works.Who Are We?We are a team of two Black women. We are composed of Cassandra Osei, MPH and PhD student, and Kiki Bryant, autodidactic sociologist and anthropologist. We are also the two halves of the Uppity Negress Podcast. All of our work centers the experiences of Black women. Cassie is researching the factors that contribute to the Black Maternal Health Crisis for her dissertation. This project is intended to provide insight for Cassie’s dissertation research as well as raise general awareness of the issue and provide knowledge for the affected demographic. We hope self help tips and education of this crisis will 1) result in a decrease in Black maternal death statistics and 2) provide greater overall reproductive health for Black women. Why Asante Warrior?Cassie immigrated to the US from Ghana when she was 4. Cassie is one of the Asante (known as Ashanti to most Westerners) peoples. Kiki’s middle name is also a reference to the Asante people. Ghana (and West Africa in general) is the source of a large part of the African Diaspora. Asante (Ashanti) people value the mother as the most important member of their community. Reverence for and protection of the mother is central to Asante culture. To be asante means to be a “fierce warrior”; one who comes from a lineage of powerful royalty. With the Asante Warrior Project, we are channeling Asante culture in revering and fighting for Black mothers. We are also channeling the ancestral spirits of Asante Warriors before us, like Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ashanti Empire (now Ghana) who fought back against British colonialists. We are each connected to the Asante people, culturally, and spiritually and we channel these connections into our analyses.