The Birth of Bay City Doulas

Bay City Doulas’ second birthday is coming up quickly! In honor of our company’s second birthday, we wanted to share the story of how we began. We hope you enjoy this week’s blog, The birth of Bay City Doulas.

How we started

Cosima and I met during additional training with our current training organization, ProDoula. It quickly became evident that we shared the same passion and goals for the care we provided as doulas to the families we work with. We both had a big dream: to help families through the postpartum period by offering top-notch, unbiased postpartum care. In addition, we felt strongly about providing opportunities to doulas in the Bay Area. As well as helping doula care become more regulated on a small scale that we could impact. We started off as friends and colleagues but quickly learned that we wanted to create an agency together with this shared vision.

Business meets pandemic

You may have noticed that Bay City Doulas’ birthday and the pandemic go hand in hand. While this felt like a huge mountain to climb over at the time, we learned that postpartum support was more crucial than ever throughout the pandemic. This was mainly because families were isolated and without the help of family or friends. At this time, we felt the stress of figuring out how to run a business during such an unknown time. Now, we realize just how lucky we were to adapt quickly to the current events and build a business at such an unprecedented time. It has made our company exceptionally strong and able to thrive.

Growing our team

From the beginning, it was vital to us to have a fantastic group of like-minded individuals who shared the same deep-rooted passion for family and postpartum care that we do. We knew that our standards and expectations were high, but simultaneously that the ongoing support, education, and community we were striving to build were exceptional. We began to network with members of our community and slowly but surely started to grow our dream postpartum doula team.

Raising the bar

A quick search on google will quickly show you that doula work is unregulated at this time. This means anyone can write, advertise, and teach doula training. Teaching anything that they think will make a wonderful doula. While we recognize that there are many different ways to approach doula work, there are aspects that we believe every doula should be well versed in working with postpartum families.

We knew that we wanted a team that offered continuous care from the beginning. We also wanted to feel confident that every team member had superior training and qualifications to provide the support Bay City Doulas would soon be known for. This is why we decided that every doula through our team would be trained through the same training organization. This means whether a doula has been a doula for ten years or ten days, they cross-certify when they join Bay City Doulas. Each doula on our team is certified, insured, background checked, vaccinated, and personally vetted through us.

Where we are today

Two years and hundreds of amazing families later, we are excited to be where we are today. We are proud of the team that we have created, and we hold pride in the care that we provide to the community. Our team of doulas has grown into a group of passionate, educated, and hard-working individuals that we work hand in hand with to continue to grow and expand. In addition to offering day and nighttime postpartum support, we also now provide live-in care to families. These live-ins range anywhere from three days to eight months. We have grown tremendously in the past two years, and our vision and heart for our work and our drive continue to grow as well.

Our promise going forward

While we continue to grow as a company, our promise to the community is that we will also continue to grow as doulas. Our mission is to provide our doulas with ongoing education and the families that we serve with top-of-the-line care for the years to come. We will continue to approach every family as individuals and honor each postpartum period as its own. We are two years into this company and cannot wait to see what the future holds. Thank you for being a part of our journey!

Thank you for reading this week’s blog, “The birth of Bay City Doulas.” For more tips and tricks on all things pregnancy, postpartum, and parenthood visit our weekly blog.