Featured Chik: Jennifer Walts

We are excited to introduce you to Jennifer Walts! She is the Owner of Wind & Water Doula Care, a Childbirth Educator and Birth Doula. Continue reading on to learn more about this bosschik and her business.

Tell us a bit about your company! What do you do? What is your mission? *
Wind & Water Doula Care offers birth doula care & childbirth education for local and distant community. We offer holistic prenatal support and uniquely empathic services to support families through labor, birth, and early postpartum. I believe in bodily autonomy and informed consent, and work to empower families to identify core values that shape their birth preferences. Wind & Water Doula Care supports a family's deep birthing desires & spend time with them envisioning postpartum healing needs as well. Through HypnoBirthing courses, families can also learn practical strategies to navigate labor, birth, and beyond. Wind & Water Doula Care guides families to take radical responsibility for their birth preparation while empowering them to strengthen self-advocacy skills in any birth location or scenario.

Wind & Water Doula Care's core mission is for families to feel support, empowered, and held with a sense of community during the transformative season of pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and parenting.

HOW I SUPPORT: I focus on honoring, witnessing, and providing full presence during a life-altering transformation for your family. I’m a firm believer that the birther’s brain, baby’s position in utero, and your family’s choice of birth team will impact your birth outcome. We work to strengthen your understanding of which of the aforementioned elements need more energy and attention. I use a trauma-informed, empathic approach to support you. I ask you a lot of questions to encourage deep reflection as you sharpen your understanding of what core values your family would like present in the birth space. I provide evidence-based information, practices, and techniques to help support your family’s decision-making from your prenatal to your postpartum journey. I even believe, with the right support and resources, labor & birth can be healing. I will encourage clients to have active & open communication with their providers and birth team to make informed decisions, and I believe in the birther’s voice centering the experience.

WHO I SUPPORT: I support ALL types of desired birth experiences and outcomes. I believe in the birthing person’s body, and I also believe in modern medicine. I am proud to support all families with a variety of configurations, all cultural backgrounds, all religious preferences, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ community. As a white cisgender female, I am committed to learning more about policy change efforts in maternal healthcare. I will continue to explore ways in which racist and sexist policies and practices are deeply engrained in the healthcare system. I will be an advocate for social change which aims to dismantle the sexist and racist structures present within the current system. I will always be learning, and I am eager to continue to do this work.

How did you get started with your business? 
As the owner of Wind & Water Doula Care, I’m so grateful to be serving families in Western Mass & beyond. I was born in Springfield, raised in Western Massachusetts, and after living on Cape Cod for 6 years, my partner and I returned to the area before welcoming our little one at Seven Sisters Midwifery & Community Birth Center in Florence, MA.

With 10+ years of teaching experience, and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Quinnipiac University, I pivoted smoothly & dove deeply into the birth world where I empower families to navigate all things perinatal. I’ve developed private childbirth education curriculum, and I’m regularly offering HypnoBirthing as an officially certified childbirth educator.

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What do you feel is most important for others to know about your business? 
Wind & Water Doula Care's Core Values:

• Working with a birth doula and childbirth educator will help families build confidence in asking the right questions at important moments in the process. Working alongside a doula and childbirth educator will provide families with time and space to strengthen their voice.
• Birth can be empowering, spiritual, healing, transformative, redemptive, and joyful.
• A family's committed preparation will significantly impact your birth experience.
• Birth is a nervous system event- it doesn't necessarily need to be a medicalized event, and yet, you need to be prepared to navigate that if needed.
• It is critical for families to build a set of tolls to help regulate the nervous system through the birthing process.
• Birth is the greatest act of simultaneous surrender and strength.
• The science of birth is a miracle, and medicinal tools & practitioners are important if physiology presents us with a true problem that needs assistance.
• Families have the right to informed consent and can refuse suggested care.
• We need to take radical responsibility to make informed decisions.
• Bodily autonomy should be a standard of maternal healthcare, but only self-advocacy will achieve this within our current healthcare system.
• Self advocacy or advocating for a loved one are skills families will need during labor, birth, and postpartum regardless of birthing location.

How would you describe your leadership style? *
My leadership style has evolved and continues to evolve. I lean healthily on local mentors who are also in birth work and fellow business owners. I am someone who people turn to when they have visions that they'd like help executing or finding a way forward with. I was recently offered an opportunity to co-facilitate a grant-funded doula program at the local free-standing birth center. Alongside the running of my business/ supporting families as they prepare for childbirth, I am building this Doula Program in its foundational, pilot year. This program will offer free, quality, comprehensive doula care to families birthing at the birth center. In order to sustain my private business, I knew I needed to lean on a solid partner, so I on-boarded a co-facilitator who brought strengths to the position that I knew I don't have. This is communal and deeply anthropological work, and it is only possible to do it in community. This is the only way to lead in this work.

When you were growing up, what is your ultimate dream job? If it's this, how does it feel to have met your dream?! If it was something different, how did your dream change over time? 
6 years ago, I didn't know what a doula was! My ultimate dream job was really just to work in a deep capacity with humans moving through transformative experiences. I taught high school for ten years while photographing weddings in the summers- attracted to transformative events, I suppose I found myself evolve into birth work so smoothly because I am drawn to guiding humans as they move through important life events- holding space for their experience and process as a guide and trusted support.

Every business owner faces challenges. How are you empowered to overcome yours? *
The beginnings of my business involved a lot of virtual offerings to families due to the social isolation that was required at the beginning of/ height of COVID. I knew that I could still create meaningful communities in the virtual learning space, but this is definitely not where I wanted the business to continue to evolve. I worked to make the space as present and grounding as possible. I imagined it was our classroom, and it worked.

In the last 4 years, my HypnoBirthing classes involved an average of 10 families virtually and 2-3 families in person. Now, the stats are completely reversed. I'm serving an average of 8-10 families in person and 3-4 virtually. I went from advertising in so many spaces and in so many ways to having most students share that they heard about the course from their provider or a former student or client.

I knew that people would eventually be craving in-person community, and I trusted that human need to rise again. Perseverance, knowing my audience, thinking about basic human needs...All of this allowed me to shift through the harder parts of beginning in a virtual capacity.

Tell us (in one word) how you would describe your boss-chik business! 
Empowerment

Anything else we should know about you, your business, or just a fun fact?! 
I love writing creatively, and my Instagram posts and blog feature some solid posts that give a taste of that! I've attended 75+ births and taught 150+ families HypnoBirthing, and I'm continuing on this path.

Where You Can Find Her:
Website | Instagram | Facebook

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