Accessible Childbirth Education and Support: Reflecting on Four Key Summit Birth Values

I recently moved to the Denver, Colorado area after five years in Utah, where I built up and still manage Summit Birth Utah. I'm now thrilled to be starting a new chapter in Colorado and launching summitbirth.org! Through the Summit Birth site, I'll connect birthing families in both Colorado and Utah with information and support for the childbearing year.
The tagline I've chosen for Summit Birth, “accessible childbirth education and support,” captures four things I'm passionate about offering to expectant parents: accessibility, birth-related content, quality education, and support through the childbearing journey.

Accessibility

Accessibility is at the core of Summit Birth’s values. I firmly believe that everyone deserves access to childbirth education and support during their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Two branches of Summit Birth help to increase access to these services:
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Blog Posts
I will regularly publish blog posts on both the Colorado and Utah blog sites. This content is free for anyone to access, and in blog posts, I’ll share trustworthy information to guide you through your childbearing year. Everything from prenatal nutrition to perineal massage and much more… So follow me on Instagram and Facebook, where I announce each new blog post, so you don’t miss a thing!

Grant Program
Summit Birth offers internally-funded grants to families with financial constraints. Grants are offered in need-based, tiered amounts, and we're typically able to offer at least a small grant to anyone with true financial need. Sometimes, we're able to offer substantial grants for those who need them most. So, if you're interested in birth classes, birth doula support, or postpartum doula support, but aren't able to afford the full investment, apply for a grant! If you're looking for other ideas about how to afford a doula, check out this blog post

Childbirth

Since the birth of my third child, you could say I've been a little obsessed with all things BIRTH. Before my son's first birthday, I started training to be a birth doula, and since then I've:

• Presented at the Evidence Based Birth® conference
• Hosted a podcast (Birth Words) synthesizing my love of birth and my applied linguistics academic background
• Attended two Spinning Babies workshops
• Added a second birth doula certification
• Certified as an advanced VBAC doula through The VBAC Link
• Hosted several trainings for other birth professionals about the power of their words, both in-person and online
• Co-designed and co-taught countless Birth Class Date Nights in Utah County, UT
• Served as a board member and then president of the Utah Doula Association
• Certified as a postpartum doula
• Became an Evidence Based Birth® (EBB) professional member
• Designed and started teaching my own childbirth curriculum (Navigating Your Unmedicated Hospital Birth)
• Took eight nursing prerequisite courses in pursuit of my now-revised goal to become a Certified Nurse Midwife/Women's Health Nurse Practitioner (read on for the details on my new goal and path!)
• Expanded my Utah birth business into an agency and added three birth doulas and a childbirth educator to the team
• Certified as a breastfeeding support doula, and
• Became an EBB instructor and now teach the EBB Childbirth Class and other workshops for birth professionals to better support their clients in receiving evidence-based care.

Two months ago, I moved my practice from Utah to Colorado, where I now offer birth doula services, postpartum doula services, private childbirth classes, and virtual EBB Childbirth Classes. Later this year, I will start offering Navigating Your Unmedicated Hospital Birth in the Denver metro area. In two weeks, I'm going back to school to get a master's degree in social work so that I can become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and land in a career I hope to stay in the rest of my life: working as a mental health therapist, focusing on offering support to those in the perinatal period (in/fertility through postpartum). (And I hope to keep a light but steady stream of birth classes and birth/postpartum doula clients on the side!)

So yeah, I guess you could say I'm a leetle obsessed with anything childbirth-related.

Education

Although my career path has been windy, education is the common thread. My bachelor's degree was in elementary education, and I felt strongly that I wanted to make a difference with the youngest of learners. After a couple of years as a classroom teacher, I realized that the large class size and young ages weren't a great fit for me, but I enjoyed tutoring elementary-aged students privately for a few years, and I also started teaching singing lessons.

My first master's degree is in applied linguistics with a focus in TESOL K-12 (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, grades K-12). When I began my degree, I thought that when I returned to teaching, I would be a specialist in an elementary school, offering additional support to students whose home language was not English. However, as I began my master's program, the birth bug bit me. Hard! See above :)

As I got sucked into birth work, I always continued to center education. Although I didn't start out teaching childbirth classes, I focused on educating my birth doula clients and providing a variety of resources where they could do their own research and make well-informed choices. I also started teaching workshops to other birth professionals early in my doula career through my Birth Words platform and now offer additional workshops through Evidence Based Birth. And I later formally added birth classes to my list of offerings. Elementary teaching wasn't a great fit for me, but I love teaching adults, both expectant parents and birth professionals! I love facilitating interactive, engaging classes and workshops, and I always learn something new from the group discussions we have in these classes!

Support

Imagine a human, growing another mini-human within her body, while she continues about most of her previous activities.

Imagine that person bringing her child out of her body and into the earth through a series of contractions and releases of the largest muscle in her body.

Imagine her disposing of an organ she grew specifically for this process, but no longer needs.

Imagine a breastfeeding mother making nutritionally-perfect food for her little human, inside of her own body, and producing enough to support the little human's growth of doubling in weight by 4-6 months.

Imagine a parent, maybe in partnership, providing everything the little human needs, from comfort to clean diapers to burping to rocking to sleep. All day. Every day.

Imagine those parents being sleep-deprived beyond belief, while still trying to juggle the demands of a household, possibly other children, recovery from the intense physical process of giving birth, a job, and other responsibilities.

These people, in this transformative and magical time in their lives, need SUPPORT. And I love to offer it!

I love supporting classes of expectant parents by sharing valuable information and skills with them as I teach birth classes.

I love supporting my birth doula clients through visits in their homes during pregnancy. I love supporting them, by their sides, during the process of labor and birth. I love visiting them in their homes to check in on them a week or so later.

I love supporting postpartum families as a postpartum doula. I love offering a listening ear and a compassionate heart, extra hands to help, and helpful resources and information about baby care and feeding or sleeping.

I also love providing support to families I never meet in person! I do this by sharing information online, on this blog and the Summit Birth Utah blog, and on our social media platforms (Instagram and Facebook).

Summit Birth: Accessible Childbirth Education and Support

Whether you're in Colorado, Utah, or anywhere else in the globe, I hope you'll join me for the services offered at Summit Birth!