Christina Ratleff
2025 Promise Sandbox Award Recipient
Christina’s Idea
A Guaranteed Basic Income pilot investing in Black birthing people to lead birth justice and economic liberation through advocacy, care, and long-term systems change.
Christina has developed the Mother’s Trust Alliance (MTA), a community-led initiative designed with and for Black birthing people to advance maternal and infant health by confronting economic injustice. This radical approach positions Black birthing people not only as those most impacted by harm, but as architects of liberation. Over the past year, she has grounded the vision in Black birthing people’s leadership and lived experience through co-design partnerships, shaping a bold solution that pairs Guaranteed Basic Income with investments in peer support, leadership development, and civic power-building. With this award, Christina will launch a 12-month prototype with 10 Black birthing people as co-designers, testing three fellowship pathways—Advocacy, Research, and Community Care—while gathering data on maternal stress, child development, and family well-being to identify what supports beyond cash drive meaningful outcomes.
As a Black woman, public health practitioner, and daughter of a single mother, Christina draws on lived experience and years of community leadership to confront systemic inequities that harm Black maternal and infant health. She envisions Guaranteed Basic Income during pregnancy and postpartum as a transformative investment in family stability, child development, and the power and leadership of Black birthing people. By pairing unconditional cash with community co-design and collective power-building, her model shifts resources and influence directly into the hands of Black birthing people—reimagining systems through dignity, joy, and liberation.
Her own journey through systems never built for her community—and her life’s work to reshape them through birth equity efforts—has shown Christina that true transformation requires putting resources and decision-making power directly in the hands of Black birthing people most impacted. She is creating a solution rooted in the belief that the brilliance of Black birthing people, not just their pain, must be at the center of what gets built.
Get to Know Christina
Christina Ratleff is a public health leader and policy strategist with nearly two decades of experience advancing racial and gender equity through systems-level change. She has led equity-focused initiatives across nonprofit and government sectors, including as Executive Director of the Columbus Women’s Commission, where she expanded paid family leave, increased municipal wages, and strengthened eviction protections. At the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs (AMCHP), she directed national birth equity initiatives, leading multi-state partnerships to improve maternal and infant health outcomes. Christina holds a Master of Public Health from Boston University and serves on the board of directors of Zora’s House.
Hopes for the Program Year
Over the next year, Christina looks forward to learning how to design and test a maternal health model that integrates guaranteed basic income, community co-design, and fellowship pathways. She’s particularly interested in how social enterprise and revenue-generating strategies can sustain this work over time. Her learning journey centers on co-designing pathways to economic and reproductive justice in deep partnership with Black mothers, honoring their leadership and lived expertise. Her vision is rooted in reimagining care as infrastructure, grounded in Black feminist values of dignity, joy, and liberation.
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