I’ve been a birth professional since 1982 when I became passionate about helping babies, mothers, and families have positive birth experiences. I founded Sierra Childbirth Institute in 2002 as an “institute without walls” and in 2019 moved into a brick-and-mortar location in Sacramento, California. With a skilled team of teachers and caring staff, SCI provides birth and postpartum doula training workshops and continuing education to aspiring and established birth professionals worldwide through in-person and online trainings, classes, and mentoring.

As many of you know, we have a broken maternity health care system in our country. I’ve been on a mission the past 40 years to improve the way birth happens. This social justice issue has motivated me to continue training doulas and aspiring midwives so that they can go on to help the families in their communities. Our communities depend on these two valuable professions to help mothers and their babies have positive birth experiences. The way babies are born matters. Healthy birth = healthy families = happy, healthy children—our future leaders.

Unfortunately SCI received existential harm to our website from a malware attack. We need your help or we may not survive to continue to serve our beloved doula community. We discovered that our site had been infected with this malware late last year and thought we had it cleared, but it was just recently re-detected when it disabled our enrollment system and derailed our Search Engine Optimization again.This unfortunate situation has been devastating and thrown SCI into a financial crisis, while we're also still recovering from the pandemic.

This funding is urgent.

Please help us rebuild our website. Without your help we don’t have the resources to do it. We have a plan to recover, and we must rebuild the pages on a different server.

We need the help of our friends and supporters to be able to rebuild our website, recover from this crisis, and keep our precious school open. We're so grateful to the thousands of people over the years who have entrusted their learning to Sierra Childbirth Institute.

If you care about our birthing families like we do, please help us stay open— even a small amount can help, as small amounts can add up!