This past Easter weekend, some doulas and birth workers gathered to brain storm and continue growing our local doula community.

You’d be surprised how often we all come across new clients who have never heard of us or didn’t know doulas existed.

Doulas have been around for many years here in the RGV but we have seen a recent growth in folks entering this field of work in the past 5 years or so. It makes this job a whole lot less lonely, I’ll tell you that much.

Birth work is never meant to be done alone, just like parenting. We need support when we process the work we do, we need guidance from peers when we are trying to serve our clients. We need new perspectives when we are troubleshooting hiccups with our businesses or family life. It’s a lot of behind the scenes work, as we often see for small business owners.

Recently, Brandi Kennedy (former doula - iykyk) started working for Holy Family Birthing Center and is currently the clinical manager there. In her new role, Brandi has reached out to local doulas to meet some new folks who are passionate about birth work. One of the lovely people Brandi invited us to meet was Claudia, originally from NYC. Claudia brings us excitement and passion with her ideas of growth and collaboration. With that said, Your RGV Doulas came together (we were missing a few faces) and got to introduce ourselves, share a little about what we do and presented ideas about how we can continue to serve the amazing RGV parents or soon-to-be-parents.

How can we let you know what we do?

How can we bring the right doula to you and your birth team?

How can we best serve you and meet you where you are?

Those are all very common questions we see from families and sometimes, families go through their entire planning process never finding us. We’d love to grow and show everyone how beneficial a doula can be for you and your family. Whether that doula is needed for your birth journey or your postpartum healing. Pregnancy is not always easy, it comes with hardship at times, and other times, with extremely difficult diagnosis or decisions to make. Having a doula who understands and can hold space for you would be ideal. No one should ever have to embark on a pregnancy journey alone.

If you have ideas on how Your RGV Doulas can grow, we’d love to hear them. In the mean time, here are some photos of this past weekend. Gathering is always so inspiring to me. I’ll cherish these photos for years to come. :)