The NYC Doula Initiative — wait, WHAT?

A few years ago I had a phone call with a Black founder, someone I connected with through social media and took a great liking to over the years. On this particular call, this founder shared that she was in a group with other Black female founders and that one of the founders had been approached by a white-led organization or business of some kind about creating a Doula directory. They asked the founder to assist them with recruiting Black and Brown Doulas to participate in this new Doula directory. The founder let this white-led organization (who were hoping to invest and capitalize off of the business of being Black/Brown in America) know that there were people ALREADY doing this work and that they needed to reach out to one of us. The Arch was a suggestion. The founder informed this white-led org/business that if they tried to go around us (which they implied), when the work was already being done AND they were already being made aware, that they would regret it (this Founder had connections in the publication world and would utilize their power to put the word out about these shady tactics). After that phone call, I didn’t hear much about it and never saw this proposed “Doula Directory”. This was in 2020. Over the years I have seen many different Doula directories, some of them created by Doulas and others created by people outside of the field, whose intentions, in my opinion, are to capitalize on the “popularity” of the work that we do.

The thing about birth work is it can seem like we all have the same common goal, and that in short, is…