The Utah Doula Association Outreach Committee 2018

By: Rachel Winsley

Welcome to another year of the UDA blog! This blog explores pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. All of the blog posts are written by birth professionals local to Utah. An introduction to the members of the UDA Outreach Committee is included below. We would love to hear what would you like to know more about! You can submit your ideas here or contact a committee member below if you have ideas to share for a blog post.

Contact a Committee Member Directly

  

Rachel Winsley – Outreach Chair

Rachel Winsley is a military veteran, La Leche League Leader, International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) Leader, Holistic Moms Network Coordinator, homeschooler, and chairperson of the Utah Doula Association (UDA) Outreach Committee.  She has just over ten years of experience as a doula and has served in several different positions on the UDA Board of Directors.  Rachel is passionate about supporting local business owners, mentoring newer doulas, and volunteering in her local community.

Rachel enjoys guiding and empowering pregnant and birthing women throughout their birth journey. She has experience supporting women through unmedicated birth, home birth, hospital birth, VBAC, birth at advanced maternal age, using epidural as a tool, special needs birth by cesarean, and vaginal breach birth with multiples. She has worked with couples practicing a wide variety of childbirth education and coping methods such as Hypnobabies, Bradley, HypnoBirthing, Birthing from Within, and Mindful Birthing. She can provide excellent referrals to midwives, OB/GYNs, chiropractors, IBCLCs, and a myriad of other practitioners spanning from Salt Lake City to Logan, Utah. She feels that a good doula will strive to maintain a positive working relationship with your provider(s), so as to foster a safe and peaceful birthing environment.  She will primarily focus her column on spotlighting birth professionals who are doing really special things across Utah.

Connect with Rachel
         
Mindful Birth – DoulaMatch
mindfulbirthutah@gmail.com
(801) 837-7435

  

Lindsay Dougal – Special Interest & Diversity

Lindsay is a certified birth doula who believes in the power of a strong support network for birthing women and their families. She grounds her practice in empowering women to remain informed of their options, pursue learning of evidence-based birth education, and—most importantly—feel supported in their journey.

Lindsay has both personal and professional experience with pregnancy loss/stillbirth, and pregnancy after loss. She has assisted women through various types of birthing experiences, including unmedicated hospital births, assisted vaginal births, epidural births, and cesarean births. Lindsay is excited to work on the blog this year, and hopes to create a space where we all feel safe and encouraged to own our stories, and—in the process—step outside ourselves and onto a path of connectedness.

Connect with Lindsay
      
https://www.lindsaydougaldoula.com/
(801) 860-4391

 

  

Sheri Rysdam, PhD – Birth

Sheri Rysdam teaches college writing and yoga. Her scholarship is rhetoric, including feminist medical rhetorics. She works as a doula in the Salt Lake City area, where she focuses on supporting young women with limited financial resources.  Sheri advocates for women as they prepare to have positive birth experiences. In addition to the comfort techniques and approaches she learned through her DONA-approved doula training, her work is influenced by extensive experience as a yoga instructor. Her goal is to assist laboring women in finding comfortable and safe alignment during labor and delivery. These movements are similar to, or the same as, yoga asanas and pranayama, or deep breathing, during labor.  Sheri’s focus on the blog is to explore topics related to prenatal and birth timeframe.

Connect with Sheri
www.sherewin.com

  

Alyssa Moulton – Postpartum

In her free time, she loves to experiment in the kitchen with new healthy recipes, teach youth and adult cooking classes, garden, hike and spend time with her husband and two children.  It is Alyssa’s belief that you birth your way! Whether you are desiring a natural water birth, a medicated birth or a planned cesarean the continuous support of a doula provides you with continued support for you and your birth preferences.  For her postpartum clients, Alyssa prepares nourishing foods, provides breastfeeding support, home cleaning/organization, facilitates sibling bonding, and runs errands.  Alyssa will share with us healthy recipes, sleep tips, breastfeeding information, and helpful tips from professional relationships she has developed as a doula.

Connect with Alyssa
           

http://www.daybreakdoula.com
daybreakdoula@gmail.com
(815) 501-5035

  

Shannon Shepherd – Editor

Shannon stands out as a placenta encapsulator and birth doula in Weber County.  She has her own commercial kitchen, dedicated to only processing placentas.  As editor, she’ll make sure that readability is on point!

Connect w/ Shannon
      

Northern Utah Doulas – DoulaMatch
http://www.bloombirthutah.com
shannon@bloombirthutah.com
(801) 309-3636