about us
Kiara Cruz
Kiara Cruz (she/her), MPH, PhD(c) is Co-Executive Director of Community Knowledge & Learning and Co-Founder of Woven. She is a maternal and child health researcher and strategist whose work is rooted in advancing health equity for Black and Brown communities by bridging research, practice, and lived experience.
At Woven, Kiara leads community knowledge and learning across research, evaluation, and pilot initiatives, ensuring community-centered insight drives implementation and systems change. Kiara brings deep expertise in trauma- and resilience-informed systems of care within maternity care networks, with a strong emphasis on qualitative and community-engaged research. Shaped by her lived experience as a Black and Hispanic mother and daughter, her work explores how social drivers of health, structural inequities, and systems-level practices shape pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences.
Her current research focuses on intimate partner violence (IPV) during the perinatal period, with an emphasis on developing community-centered interventions and implementation strategies that promote safer, more equitable care for birthing people and their families. Across her work, Kiara is known for translating research into actionable, community-accountable tools and strategies that support sustainable systems change.
Outside of her work, Kiara loves spending time with her family, making her own coffee, traveling the world, and getting lost in a good book. Kiara earned her Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate in Maternal and Child Health.
MPH, PhD(c)
Zainab Jah
Zainab Jah (she/her), MPH is Co–Executive Director of Community Strategy & Accountability and Co-Founder of Woven. She is a community- based researcher and strategist whose work centers reproductive justice, birth equity, and systems change for Black and Brown birthing people transnationally. Her leadership is grounded in a deep commitment to decolonized practice, relational accountability, and non-extractive partnership.
At Woven, Zainab leads partnership design, cross-sector collaboration, and systems change strategy, working alongside communities, institutions, and funders to shift power, embed accountability, and translate lived expertise into action. She brings extensive experience in community-based and mixed-methods research and is known for navigating complex systems while centering community leadership and guiding institutions toward more just and sustainable approaches. Her work has a particular focus on the intersections of climate change and maternal health, where she leads efforts to integrate community insight into systems change strategies across the U.S. and transnational contexts.
Across her work, Zainab pairs rigorous technical research skills with innovative, community-informed approaches to ensure research, strategy, and policy remain accountable to the people whose lives are shaped by these systems. Outside of her work, Zainab loves collecting vinyl records, traveling in search of good food, and spending time with her family.
Zainab earned her Master of Public Health in Behavioral Science and Health Education from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where she also completed a certificate in Mental Health.
MPH
Susan Perez
Susan Perez (she/her), MPH, PhD is the Principal Consultant of Woven. Her work is guided by community accountability, shared power, and collective impact, centering lived experience as essential evidence while maintaining rigor, transparency, and policy relevance.
At Woven, Susan advances community-centered health services research across academic, policy, and practice settings. Her work integrates qualitative methods, policy analysis, and decision science to examine how health systems design, governance, and financing shape health outcomes and care experiences. Susan’s research centers community knowledge as essential evidence, elevating patient and provider perspectives to inform equitable health policy and systems change. Her work critically examines how institutional practices, power dynamics, and health system infrastructure influence decision-making in maternity care and broader health services, with the goal of improving quality, access, and accountability across systems.
Her current research examines maternal health through the lens of health services decision-making, with a focus on how policy and institutional practices shape care delivery and outcomes. Using community-centered qualitative methods, her work elevates the perspectives of birthing people, clinicians, and policymakers to inform healthcare systems. She is a health services researcher whose work focuses on understanding individual decision-making processes in order to develop healthcare policies, information, and resources to promote systems that center the needs, values, and expertise of those most impacted. Susan is known for translating complex evidence into actionable, community-accountable policy insights and implementation strategies that support sustainable, systems-level change.
Outside of her work, you can find Susan exploring local coffee shops, perusing independent bookstores, and moonlighting as an amateur anthropologist of the untamed seasons of life.
Susan completed a postdoctoral fellowship in quality, safety, and comparative effectiveness research and earned a doctorate in Nursing Science and Health-Care Leadership program at the University of California, Davis.
MPh, phd