Leadership Training Academy 2026 Recap
It was a full week of curriculum, advocacy, and community.
Inching closer to a dream of realizing reproductive health, rights, and justice for all through advocacy, connection, and care.
Do you dream of a future where everyone’s reproductive health, rights, and justice are realized? At PRH we do, and with each passing year, this dream is more tangible after we meet new physician advocates who join us and complete our Leadership Training Academy. We often say that PRH is an advocacy “home” for our LTA Fellows. While we offer training, guidance, and support on each Fellow’s advocacy journey, we also learn so much from them and their work, dedication, collaboration, and energy to fuel the movement for health care access and bodily autonomy across the country.
Just last month, we spent one week in Washington, DC, meeting our current cohort of 33 physician Fellows. It was a full week of curriculum, advocacy, and community, and we’d love to give you a recap of how we spent our time.
We lobbied on Capitol Hill for gender-affirming care, advocating for the Transgender Healthcare Access Act, and answering legislative offices’ questions on the facts and science about this essential and life-saving health care.
We had conversations about creating change and advocating within institutional and professional association spaces. We sighed while reviewing the current state and federal policy landscape for sexual and reproductive health, but also acknowledged some wins, including Maryland’s 2025 law creating a public health abortion grant program in the state, and Montana’s 2025 court ruling that permanently blocks a ban on health care for transgender youth.
We discussed what it looks like for physicians to show up in support of individuals, families, and communities within the courts and family policing systems. We talked about the dangers of physicians being an extension of state violence and criminalization. We spent time with community partners and LTA alumni, who so graciously laid out different advocacy roadmaps for our Fellows.
There is no single, correct way to advocate, and we encourage the LTA Fellows to reflect on what kind of advocacy really excites and motivates them to use their positionality and voice. We recognize this is not one project or a short-term goal.
We also spent time taking deep breaths. We stretched and danced. We laughed. We ate delicious food. We asked the Fellows to show themselves love and give themselves a round of applause. Our physician advocates are incredible, and we want to celebrate them. We gave them time to have smaller, more individual conversations. We want our Fellows to know that they are not isolated or alone. These are significant acts of care, connection, and love – all vital in our justice movements. We left the week feeling motivated, connected, and inspired.
Over the last 20 years, it’s been imperative that the reproductive rights movement – historically led by white feminists and focusing almost exclusively on abortion – expands the way it defines autonomy, wellbeing, and safety while centering the experiences of people most impacted by restrictive policies and policing: Black, Brown, and Indigenous birthing people.
The reproductive justice framework offers an intersectional, inclusive, and more effective roadmap rooted in human rights that advocates, activists, organizers, communities, and yes, physicians, can use as a beacon of shared hope by laying down the foundations for a liberated future for all.
At PRH, this means prioritizing our issue areas to include gender-affirming care, self-managed care, and decriminalization of pregnancy outcomes in addition to abortion advocacy. It means calling in physicians of specialties other than Ob-Gyns to get involved and get loud. It requires self-work and self-care within systems that dehumanize and focus on profit and control. It involves getting more comfortable at the intersections of law, medicine, and white supremacy.
With this shift, we have seen our Fellows meet the moment and share their work with us across movements and issue areas: from changing harmful hospital drug testing policies, to spending time on the M&A Hotline, educating colleagues on not engaging with immigration enforcement, and fundraising for mutual aid that extends beyond borders. The LTA is a space for us at PRH to connect with physician advocates and figure out how we continue this intersectional work together — because we are in it for the long-term. When we see the faces of our Fellows in-person, when we scheme and co-conspire, when we hug and laugh, when we take a pause, we plant the seeds to grow our dream of attainable RHRJ for all.
You could read our recap, or you can hear it directly from the Fellows themselves; here are some of the takeaways we heard from participants this year:
“They built such a great space (figuratively and literally) for us to be together and learn and grow.”
“I loved being able to have a space to learn and to talk about the changing landscape of care provision in the face of authoritarianism. I thought it was so valuable to hear others’ perspectives and to gain the language necessary to understand and talk about these issues more meaningfully.”
“I really valued learning the concrete, real-world examples of how physicians can collaborate with lawyers and legal aid organizations to better serve our patients. It reinforced for me that it isn’t this ‘unattainable’ thing, by the same token, it was a great call on us to be more proactive.”
We’d love for you to join us. If you are a physician interested in applying for the LTA, please sign up here to be notified when our application launches.
Apply to join our next cohort
Applications will open in the spring of 2026 to join 520+ advocates from across the country in fighting for reproductive health care for all.
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