Something I Am So Excited to Share: Heart of Maine Doula Training

If you follow along with Sunny Side, you know I am always up to something. Here is the something.

Along with two people I deeply admire, I am launching Heart of Maine Doula Program. And I want to tell you how it came to be, because the story is a good one.

I met Jessica and Laurie on the Board of Directors of Community Doulas, the Maine nonprofit that offers sliding scale doula support to families who might otherwise go without. Laurie is our president. Jessica is our program director. I am the treasurer. Three very different people, one very clear shared belief: everyone deserves support during one of the biggest transitions of their life.

Spending time together on that board, we kept circling back to the same hard truth. Maine has a maternal care shortage and a doula shortage, and the two are tangled together. Families are stretched thin. Providers are stretched thinner. And in 2028, MaineCare begins covering doula support, which means demand is about to grow in a very real way. That is wonderful news. It is also a problem if there are not enough trained doulas to meet it.

Laurie and Jessica saw this coming clearly. If we wanted to keep caring for families, we could not just hope more doulas would appear. We had to train them. That is where the idea for Heart of Maine Doula Training was born, right there in our board conversations.

Here is what I love about this trio. We each bring something the other two do not, and it turns out you need all three to build a training program that actually works.

Jessica brings years of experience as a doula, a placenta encapsulation specialist, and an educator. She knows this work in her bones, and she knows how to teach it. Laurie brings years of school administration alongside her own doula experience, which means she understands both the birth space and what it takes to build a program that runs, holds up, and serves people well.

And then there is me. My skill set is a little unusual for a doula. I have the business and accounting background. I served as associate director of a large doula agency in Boston. And now, I own my own agency here in Maine. But if I am being honest, I learned almost everything I know from running my dad's small business in high school. My first real job was posting his cars for sale on eBay, which might have been my very first attempt at social media marketing, and keeping his books. I was sixteen. Passion for birth work is essential, and it is not enough on its own, so that business piece is exactly what I get to bring to this table.

The heart of all of this comes straight from Community Doulas. Our roots there are our guiding principles. Support should be accessible and inclusive, full stop, so the training we are building has to be too.

If you have ever thought about becoming a doula yourself, or you know someone who has, I would love for you to keep an eye on Heart of Maine. More soon on how you can join us.