Abuela Doulas is not a Doula UK approved course and I get asked about that more than almost anything else. It feels easier to answer it here than simply in an FAQ
A Doula UK approved course follows the Doula UK Core Curriculum. It’s assessed by an independent assessor against that curriculum, and the course is led by an experienced doula and trainer. Once the assessment is completed, they are invited to join Doula UK as a member.
This process tells a prospective student that a course covers a defined curriculum and that someone has looked at it.
What it doesn’t tell you is whether that curriculum was built with Black and Brown people in mind., or whether the assessor who signed it off understands what it costs a Black woman/birthing person, or doula, to be dismissed in a delivery room, or whether “inclusivity training” as a tick box produces anything different in how a doula actually shows up.
Doula work in the UK is unregulated. There is no legal qualification that you need. Approval is a membership stanadard set by one organisation, not a floor for the whole profession, and it was never built to answer the question Black and Brown women and people are actually asking when they come to me: “will this doula understand what’s happening to me, or will I have to explain racism to them whilst I’m in labour?”
A course can follow the curriculum, pass its assessment, and still teach cultural safety as one afternoon module bolted onto a birth physiology day. What we see is that complicance with someone else’s curriculum tells you a course exists inside their framework. What it doesn’t tell you is whether that framework was built with your body in the room.
I’ve watched what Doula UK approval does and doesn’t stand for. It does not stand consistently for marginalised communities, and I’m not interested in asking permission from a body that hasn’t show me it will hold that line, to validate work that already holds it.
Abuela Doulas is the UK’s first Black owned and led doula training organisation. I didn’t build this to fit inside an existing curriculum with a module added for diversity. Anti-racism is the architecture the whole course runs through: how you’re taught, what you’re taught and how the room is held when harm shows up in it. Every other course I could find added a cultural competency session. I built the Abuela Doulas course around it.
That’s a harder thing to build and a harder things to assess, because there’s no external body checking it. I’m the standard. I’ve had twenty-two years in this work, trained initially by Michel Odent and Liliana Lammers (Paramanadoulas), I had a seat on RCOG Race Equality Taskforce, and every Black, Brown, queer, disabled and marginalised student who’s come through this training came because they knew it would be a safe space for them and because they couldn’t find what they needed anywhere else. It’s a body of work that you can check yourself. I have the receipts.
When you train with Abuela Doulas, you leave with a certificate as an official Abuela Doula. You don’t leave with Doula UK membership, because that was never the offer. What you leave with is training that treats justice as the foundation and a facilitator relationship that doesn’t end when the course does.
If you’re comparing training providers and Doula UK approval is on your checklist, ask what it’s actually measuring before you let it decide for you. Ask who builds the curriculum, who it was built for and whether the course you’re looking at was designed around your community, or fitted your community into a template buillt for someone else.
Abuela Doulas is built around Black and Brown people because that’s who kept walking through the door needing something no one else was offering. That’s the standard and I’m standing ten toes down.
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.
