Most doula training treats anti-racism as a topic. Abuela Doulas doesn’t work that way. Anti-racism and cultural safety aren’t things we cover, they’re the structure everything else sits inside.
This page pulls together how that actually works in practice, as a framework you can look at properly. Below is an overview of each part.
Doula work isn’t a regulated profession in the UK and as such there is no single body that decides who gets to practise. Doula UK approval is one organisation’s mark, not a legal requirement. We chose not to shape our training around a framework that wasn’t built for the priorities we hold and whilst that decision has consequences, we think they’re worth it.
Anti-racism work doesn’t stop at birthwork. What we bring into rooms full of healthcare professionals through Breaking Ground and the RICI framework, (Recognition, Intention, Creation, Impact), is a structured way of understanding how harm actually gets produced and not just where it lands.
Intention, Creation, Impact is how we teach doulas to think about harm when it happens in a training room or a birth space. This is not as something to punish quickly, but as something to understand properly first. Most anti-bias training skips straight to consequence. We don’t.
A single session on cultural awareness, that doesn’t speak beyond maternal statistics, bolted onto an otherwise unchanged curriculum, is not what makes a course anti-racist. It simply makes it a course with one different afternoon that ticks a box.
National data consistently shows Black and Asian women and birthing people face significantly higher risks of serious harm in UK maternity care than white women do. Black and Brown bodied people also need to navigate a system that erases them. Any training that doesn’t reckon with that fact directly isn’t preparing doulas for the reality of the work.
Advocacy isn’t the same as taking over. Nor is it defined narrowly into tone of voice. A doula’s job is to point the way and stand beside someone, not to become their voice. That is where that line sits. Why it matters, is something we teach explicitly rather than leaving new doulas to work out for themselves.
When harm happens in a training room, and let’s be frank, it does, the instinct to punish quickly is usually the wrong one. At Abuela Doulas, we hold space for repair first. That’s a harder, slower way to run a room, and it’s the one that actually changes how people practise afterwards.
Culture doesn’t sit in one week of a course. It runs through birth, postnatal care, loss, and infant feeding all the way through. Treating it as a single unit teaches doulas to compartmentalise something that families experience as continuous
If you’re comparing courses and anti-racism matters to you, here’s what’s worth checking beyond the marketing language, and what questions to ask before you commit to anyone’s training, including ours.
The Abuela Doulas newsletter.
What’s happening in birth, what the reports aren’t saying loudly enough, and when the next cohorts open.
Abuela Doulas recognises that as well as doing the work, they need to support the work of others. With that in mind, here are some links to support not only us, but other organisations that we are involved in.
