DONA International was my organizational home for many years. I was trained by Penny Simkin in 1996 along with my training partners, Karen Kohls, PT, and Ruth Ancheta, MA. By putting our three minds and specialties together...
There’s 67 Different Doula Training Organizations! Uh oh! Or maybe not? Recently, Kim James of DoulaMatch.net reported that birth and postpartum doulas have listed 67 different training organizations in their online profiles. Why are there so many? What are the [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Doulas Are Paraprofessionals Encouraging professional behavior by doulas is one of the purposes of this blog, but it needs to be clear that the doula occupation is a paraprofession, not a profession. Community based, hospital employed, and independent practice [...]
How Doulas Undermine Our Own Value (it’s not free births) Anytime I read a “doula” writing online that she knows everything she needs to know already, I want to burst. You know what? You don’t. When you say [...]
Not Any Woman Can One of my most hated myths about doula care is the idea that any woman can be a doula. Just put a person born with a uterus in a labor room and she’ll be [...]
Top Ten Questions For Choosing A Doula Training I hear a lot on Facebook, “If I’d only known that before I took my training…” The market for doula training has changed incredibly, especially in the last 5 years. [...]
Sign-Up for access to Research, articles, and Skills Development Tips
Copyright © Amy Gilliland | Website Handcrafted by Ocreative