What do doulas earn? It’s time we #listentodoulas to find out!

If you’re a doula, or coordinate a doula program, you know that we never fit neatly into boxes. You learn to live in the gray area between ‘healthcare’ and ‘personal services.’ Between ‘health advocate’ and ‘health educator’, and sometimes you’ve pondered ‘health coach’ as a category on forms.

As a community of doulas who have the potential to impact health outcomes in the United States and around the globe, it’s time we dealt with the problem of being invisible.

For many of us, we’re invisible in countless other ways in addition to having a profession that is always contextualized as ‘like a midwife’ but not a midwife.

In fact, one of the frustrations you may have experienced is that searching for this:

How much do doulas earn in our professions?

We get this: data that comes from research that combined “midwives.”

Not only were the authors (both of the original market research and of the content that emerged from it) not familiar with the various pathways and diversity of training options, the data set is useless.

Nothing about the conclusions are accurate or representative of our experiences.

Okkanti aims to stop the invisibility of the doula. We want to be sure that the work of doulas is not only seen, but celebrated, and is recognized clearly as a profession that requires skills, knowledge, and expertise in areas that include mental health, health literacy, health care systems, reproductive health, newborn development, lactation, postpartum health, family systems, attachment, wellness, and so much more, but that is an art and skill all it’s own.

And we want to establish appropriate, sustainable wages for the work we do that has the potential to save billions in preventable health spending each year.

We’re opening up the first of many inquiries to come that give us all both the capacity to see and to be seen in the context of care professionals. We want to weave our stories and to build real data, to have benchmarks with which to negotiate.

You can help us build this and other data sets to answer the question “ What do doulas earn?” with something that actually represents your experience.

We’re working with an independent research partner who understands the importance of listening to stakeholders, and making our experiences visible.

We need to know where we are today, if we are to move the needle towards being recognized for our impacts.

For that matter, our midwife partners deserve recognition for their work and training and commitments. We are ‘like a midwife’ in the ways we work towards a person-centered, compassionate, safe and equitable health system, and midwives are ‘like a doctor’ in their care delivery overlap, but the midwifery model is uniquely powerful, the doula model is uniquely powerful, and all these roles (doctors, nurses, doulas, midwives, newborn specialists, postpartum doulas) are distinct.

Whether you’re in the private pay space and establishing fair and appropriate fees for services, building a community doula project, or advocating for fair pricing at the policy level for doula care covered by Medicaid, or discussing salary, you deserve to have access to accurate baseline data on compensation, our industry wellbeing, our personal wellbeing and our impacts.

We have work to do to undo this invisibility, particularly as we take our place in solving our maternal care crisis, improving outcomes for all families, and increasingly participating as collaborators in building generational health.

Be heard, and share with those whose voices need to be at the table.

Complete our Listening to Doulas Survey (it just takes 5 minutes), and share this with those you know who know, without confusion, that they show up in all their glory, as a doula!