Today we’d like to introduce you to Chakeia Blocker.
Hi Chakeia, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
**Chakeia Blocker | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, The Blocker Collective**
I did not begin my career with a roadmap to becoming a public affairs leader or building a national public impact consulting firm. I began as a young single mother earning $7.25 an hour, pursuing my education and working to create a better future for my child. While interning on Capitol Hill, I saw how decisions made in government shaped the opportunities available to families like mine. I also saw why the people affected by those decisions needed a voice in them.
That lesson stayed with me throughout my career in public service. In the office of Congressman Steny H. Hoyer, I helped constituents navigate federal agencies and connect with resources. Later, as a Biden-Harris Administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Energy, I worked with government and community partners across the Mid-Atlantic and Appalachian regions to support implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and expand awareness of federal clean-energy resources.
In August 2024, my life changed in a way my professional experience could not have prepared me for. During the birth of my fourth child by C-section, I experienced severe preeclampsia, acute kidney injury, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), and a massive postpartum hemorrhage. I needed four blood transfusions and ICU-level monitoring. I survived, but my recovery did not end when I came home. It continued physically and emotionally while I was also caring for my family.
For years, I had worked within institutions and helped people access systems meant to serve them. After nearly losing my life in childbirth, I understood on a deeper level what it means to need those systems to listen, respond, and treat you as a whole person. That experience gave new urgency to my work in Black maternal health, patient-centered care, and health equity. It also reinforced something I had believed since my earliest days in public service: lived experience belongs in the rooms where decisions are made.
Today, my husband Juwan and I are building **The Blocker Collective** around that belief. As a national public impact consulting firm, we help organizations connect strategy with the people their decisions affect. Our work brings together public affairs, policy, advocacy, leadership development, community engagement, and storytelling. We partner with government agencies, healthcare organizations, nonprofits, educational institutions, foundations, corporations, and community leaders to understand challenges, engage stakeholders, build partnerships, and turn ideas into action.
That can mean helping a healthcare organization hear directly from the families it serves and use what it learns to shape its community engagement strategy. It can also mean helping a mission-driven organization bring partners together around a public issue and develop a plan to move its work forward. In each case, we want the people closest to the challenge to help shape the response.
I also founded **National Leadership & Advocacy Enterprise**, the advocacy and public impact division of The Blocker Collective. Through that work, I bring community voices, lived experience, and policy expertise together to inform more responsive decisions. Black maternal health and birth equity are central to my advocacy, alongside women’s leadership, civic engagement, and stronger relationships between institutions and the communities they serve.
Juwan brings his experience in public affairs, civic engagement, leadership development, and media to our work. We founded The Blocker Collective because we believe organizations can accomplish more when they understand the people behind the issues they are trying to address. We help leaders move from conversations about community impact to strategies they can carry out with communities.
My journey from young single mother to federal appointee to maternal health survivor has shaped the leader I am today. I know what it feels like to need opportunity, to work inside government, and to depend on a healthcare system during the most vulnerable moment of my life. Those experiences are why I do this work. I want more people to be heard, more leaders to act on what they hear, and more families to feel the difference.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Was it a smooth process to get here?
No, it wasn’t.
Being the first, and often the only, person who looked like me or came from a background like mine in certain political spaces came with its own challenges. I had to learn how to navigate rooms and systems that weren’t necessarily designed with someone like me in mind.
There were moments when I questioned whether I belonged in those spaces, but I kept reminding myself that I didn’t get there by accident. Every experience, from working my way through college as a young, single mother to serving in congressional offices and eventually being appointed to work for the President of the United States in a leadership role, prepared me for the next room.
The journey wasn’t smooth, but it was intentional. I learned how to take up space, use my voice, and understand that sometimes being the first means you have a responsibility to make the path a little wider for the people coming behind you.
That is ultimately what drives me today. I’m not interested in simply being able to say I was in the room. I want to help create more opportunities for other people to get in the room, have a seat at the table, and have their voices shape what happens next.
As you know, we’re big fans of The Blocker Collective . For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
The Blocker Collective is really the culmination of everything my husband, Juwan, and I have experienced personally and professionally. It was born from a belief that lasting change isn’t built around people. It’s built with them.
We founded The Blocker Collective as a national public impact firm that helps leaders, organizations, institutions, and communities navigate complex challenges and turn vision into action.
Our work sits at the intersection of strategy, leadership, public affairs, community engagement, communications, and social impact. We provide executive strategy and advisory services, public impact and advocacy strategy, community and institutional engagement, communications and thought leadership, and sector-specific impact consulting.
That can look like helping an executive develop a strategic plan, helping an organization navigate government and public policy, building coalitions and partnerships, engaging communities around an issue, strengthening a leader’s public presence, or developing strategies to address complex challenges in areas like healthcare, maternal health, education, food security, and economic mobility.
What sets us apart is the perspective we bring to the work. We understand what it means to sit at the table inside institutions and government, but we also understand what it means to be part of the communities those decisions ultimately affect. We bring those perspectives together to help our clients build strategies that are not only thoughtful, but practical, community-informed, and designed for measurable impact.
Our work is organized around five interconnected impact areas: Leadership & Executive Strategy; Government Relations, Public Affairs & Public Policy; Healthy Communities; Education & Opportunity; and Economic Mobility & Community Prosperity.
One of the initiatives I’m most proud of is our National Black Maternal Health Initiative, launching in Charles County, Maryland. Charles County is our initial demonstration site for a model that brings community members, healthcare professionals, policymakers, public agencies, advocates, and organizations together to identify challenges, develop community-informed solutions, implement strategies, and measure outcomes. The vision is national, but we believe meaningful change has to start by listening locally.
Brand-wise, I’m most proud that The Blocker Collective reflects who we are and how we believe change should happen. We’re not interested in simply being another firm that comes into a community, tells people what they need, and leaves. We believe the people closest to an issue should have a voice in shaping the strategy and the solution.
I want readers to know that The Blocker Collective is about more than consulting. It’s about helping people and institutions move from vision to action, building stronger partnerships, and creating impact that can actually be felt in the communities we serve.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
I actually didn’t have one traditional mentor who guided me throughout my entire career. What I did have were people who became mentors to me in different seasons and different roles. In each position I held, there were people who took the time to teach me, challenge me, and show me how to navigate the role I was in at that particular time.
But beyond those relationships, my faith has been a major part of my journey. I believe Jesus Christ guided me into rooms, placed the right people in my path, and gave me the courage to walk into spaces I didn’t always feel prepared for.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that when you invest in yourself, people are more likely to invest in you. Invest in your knowledge. Invest in your skills. Invest in how you show up. Invest in becoming the person you’re called to be.
For me, networking has never been about collecting contacts. It’s about building genuine relationships. Sometimes those relationships lead to opportunities, sometimes they lead to mentorship, and sometimes they simply give you the wisdom you need for the season you’re in.
I also learned not to wait until I felt completely ready. There were rooms I walked into where I didn’t have a blueprint. I had to be willing to learn, ask questions, listen, and figure things out along the way.
So my advice is to invest in yourself, be intentional about your relationships, and don’t be afraid to walk into rooms where you may not know exactly what comes next. You never know who God will place in your path or who may see something in you and decide to invest in you.
And now, as I continue to build The Blocker Collective, I’m intentional about pouring into others and being the kind of person who can help someone else navigate their next room.
Contact Info:
- Website: Still in the publishing process
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chakeiab?stkn=MWMzOGQzMWkxMTJv&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BmaC869Vq/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chakeia-blocker-mpa-082a0289?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios
