If you are a Black woman in the UK looking for doula training, you are not just choosing a course. You are choosing whether the room you learn in will hold you or use you.
That sounds dramatic. It isn’t. The latest MBRRACE-UK report, covering 2022 to 2024, found that Black women were nearly three times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or up to six weeks after birth. The maternal death rate overall went up, not down. That is the landscape you are training to walk into.
Here’s a question for you. Does the training you are looking at know that? Not as a slide. Not as a statistic read out on day three. Does it know it in the way it is built?
Most doula training in this country was not built for you. It was built for a default trainee and a default client, and you were expected to fit yourself in around the edges.
Some courses have since added a session on race. Some have added a Black facilitator to the website. Neither of those things is the same as a training designed with you at the centre. One is a module. The other is architecture. A module can be skipped, rushed, or softened when the room gets uncomfortable. Architecture holds everything up. Take it out and the whole thing falls.
That is the difference this series is about.
Over the next four posts in this series: why framework matters as much as content, what to look for, the red flags, and what it looks like when a training is built for you from the ground up.
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.
