Dedicated to the Development of Doulas and Our Profession

"To Heal and Protect" Personal reasons people attend doula trainings. Text on tree background - png

Jan 26, 2017

“To Heal and Protect”: Attending Birth Doula Trainings for Personal Reasons

A small but influential group of people attend birth doula trainings not to become doulas, nurses or midwives, nor to positively influence births in other jobs, but to help heal from their own birth experiences (Gilliland, 2016). In any 10 to 12 person training, one or two people are there primarily to make sense of their own births or to make sure their future births are better. Although small in number, their motivations influence the type of discussions that occur…

Dec 29, 2016

Career Minded Participants in Birth Doula Trainings

Its natural to assume everyone in your birth doula training was there to become a doula. Not so! Only about half the people are there because they want to do labor support as birth doulas. What else can my research can tell us about career minded attendees? In my Journal of Perinatal Education article, “What Motivates People To Take Doula Trainings?” (Summer 2016, Vol 25, No. 3, p. 174-183), “become a professional birth doula with my own practice” ranked as the fourt…

Doula training participants listening to a training

Nov 09, 2016

Take a Doula Training, Change the World

Almost ten years ago I noticed many happy participants at the end of trainings but few people actually went on to become doulas. Being a researcher I decided to do a study, which was recently published as “What Motivates People To Take Birth Doula Trainings?” in the Journal of Perinatal Education, Summer 2016, Vol 25, No. 3. While I can’t repeat what was written for JPE because of copyright restrictions, the blog allows me to explore the findings of this research pro…

Woman wearing her baby representing ICWA

Oct 13, 2016

What U.S. Birth Professionals Need to Understand About ICWA

The Indian Child Welfare Act – why is that relevant to my practice?The laws concerning children’s rights changed earlier this year. Although standards vary among the 544 tribal nations recognized by the United States government, some tribes consider a person with one drop of Native American blood as a member. While only slightly over five million people have full or partial Native American heritage, the growth rate within the population is more than double that of o…

Hospital Doula Agreements an Opportunity for Engagement. Text on image of documents - png

Jul 24, 2016

Hospital Agreements: An Opportunity For Engagement [Part II]

If a doula agreement is being waved in front of you, congratulations! It means that your doula community has gotten too large to ignore and is having enough of an impact that the hospital wants to exert some control. Now the real work begins, not with clients, but with the institutions where our clients are choosing to birth. You have an opportunity to create a collaborative atmosphere even if their actions seem hostile at the moment. This is politics, system change,…

Hospital Doula Agreements - Right Problem, Wrong Solution:Part 1. Text on image of documents - png

Jun 27, 2016

Hospital Agreements: The Wrong Solution for the Right Problem

Birth doulas are concerned about hospitals requiring signed agreements in order for them to practice their livelihood on the facility’s grounds. Some agreements outline scope of practice behaviors and even have vaccination requirements. My concern is that these agreements are seen by hospital leaders as an easy solution, without realizing that agreements without prior negotiation lead to greater conflict and tension, thus worsening the situation for their staff rathe…