Counseling Skills Online Course(s) & Continuing Education

Kimberly Seals Allers is an award-winning journalist, author and a nationally recognized commentator, consultant and advocate for breastfeeding and infant health. A former writer at FORTUNE and senior editor at Essence magazine, Kimberly’s thoughtful and provocative online commentaries on motherhood and infant health and the intersection of race, class and culture, received over 10 million page views last year.

In addition, Kimberly specializes in issues related to African American motherhood and breastfeeding. In March 2012, she launched Black Breastfeeding 360°, a first of its-kind online multi-media content library on the black breastfeeding experience. She is author of The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy (Amistad/HarperCollins) a hip and informative African American pregnancy guidebook and two other Mocha Manual™ books in the series. She is the founder of MochaManual.com, a pregnancy and parenting destination and blog for African Americans and former editorial director of The Black Maternal Health Project of Women’s eNews.

Kimberly is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A divorced mother of two, she lives in Queens, New York City, with her children and two turtles.

Joy MacTavish, MA, IBCLC, RLC is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant and certified Holistic Sleep Coach focusing on the intersections of infant feeding, sleep, and family well-being. Through her business, Sound Beginnings, she provides compassionate and evidence-based support to families in the greater Seattle area, and virtually everywhere else. She entered the perinatal field in 2007 as birth and postpartum doula, and childbirth and parenting educator. Joy holds a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies, graduate certificate in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and two Bachelors degrees from the University of Washington. She enjoys combining her academic background, analytical skills, and passion for social justice into her personal and professional endeavors. Joy serves as an Advisory Committee Member and guest speaker for the GOLD Lactation Academy. When not working or learning, she can be found homeschooling, building LEGO with her children, or dreaming up her next big adventure.

Robin Kaplan has been an IBCLC since 2009, the same year that she opened up the San Diego Breastfeeding Center. She founded the San Diego Breastfeeding Center Foundation in 2016, a 501(c)3 organization whose mission is to reduce breastfeeding disparities among families of color and low-income families, as well as provide scholarships for women of color to become IBCLCs.

Robin was the founding host of the Boob Group podcast and published her first book, Latch: a Handbook for Breastfeeding with Confidence at Every Stage in 2018. Robin’s center has been a clinical training site for the UCSD Lactation Consultant program since 2015.

In 2019/2020, Robin helped write the curriculum for the University of California San Diego Lactation Educator Counselor program and was the Program Manager for the UCSD Curriculum Development Team for the Pathway 1&2 Lactation Consultant program. Robin has a BA from Washington University in St Louis and Masters in Education from University of California Los Angeles. Robin is currently attending the Functional Nutrition Alliance to become a Functional Nutrition Counselor.

Michelle Pensa Branco MPH IBCLC is a lactation consultant and public health advocate. In addition to her clinical practice, which has included in-hospital, outpatient and private practice settings, she advocates for improved maternal-child health practices at the local, national and global level. She has a particular interest in the impact of trauma to breastfeeding families, models of peer support to improve breastfeeding outcomes and the application of health communication principles to the promotion and protection of breastfeeding. Michelle serves as the Director of Peer Support Programs and provides clinical lactation expertise for Nurture Project International, the only international NGO focused exclusively on infant feeding in emergencies. With Jodine Chase, she co-founded a Canadian non-profit organization, SafelyFed Canada. She is also an active member of the Ontario Public Health Association’s Breastfeeding Promotion Working Group. Michelle has previously served as the Vice-Chair of La Leche League Canada, the Communications Director for the Canadian Lactation Consultants Association as well as the Toronto Coordinator of INFACT Canada. When she is not travelling for work, Michelle stays close to home, living with her family just outside Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Johanna Sargeant is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, teacher and writer based in Zurich, Switzerland. She is passionate about utilising her background in education, biological science, psychology and language to empower parents with empathetic support and evidence-based information through her private practice, Milk and Motherhood.

Originally from Australia, Johanna provides much-needed English-speaking support to many thousands of parents throughout Switzerland and across Europe, and has recently been writing new education modules for the European Society of Paediatric Research and the European Society of Neonatology. She has taught at the University of Zurich, has spoken as a panelist for the WHO's Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative congress in Geneva, has been an expert speaker and facilitator for Google, and has presented at a wide variety of international conferences. The complexities of her personal feeding experiences fuels her passion for providing knowledgeable, guilt-free infant feeding support globally.

Dr. Smaranda Nay is a Family Doctor, an IBCLC, a Personal Development Counselor and a mother. She has been studying Transactional Analysis psychotherapy since 2007 and is now in her second year of training to become a Somatic Experience therapist. She uses her knowledge to teach parents how to connect with their children and how to attune to their babies’ needs, both through individual counselling sessions and in classes. She is part of the Romanian Lactation Consultants Association and holds lactation education courses for future IBCLCs. She gives lactation counselling consults and holds breastfeeding and childcare courses.

She also holds personal development workshops for teenagers and adults, collaborating with non-formal education organizations and schools. She is particularly curious about the development of an attuned relationship between people and building intimacy and trust. Working with babies, she observes the parent-child connection and explores its potential in healing and growth, and how it impacts the future development of the individual. Working with teenagers and adults, she facilitates ways in which childhood disruptions can be healed in the present.

Shondra Mattos is an IBCLC, Entrepreneur & Speaker who delivers progressive, up-to-date lectures that challenge the current standard of Lactation Care. She is widely regarded as the go-to source for those looking for clear, understandable clinical knowledge.

In 2018, Shondra rebranded her lactation practice Mattos Lactation and provided location-independent lactation support to families across the country. In 2020 she founded Lactnerd LLC with the focus of helping healthcare providers gain knowledge while conquering the intimidation of learning the complex science of Lactation.

Through her companies- Lactnerd & Mattos Lactation - she provides tools, resources, education & mentoring to aspiring and established lactation professionals across the USA.

Liz Brooks is a private practice International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) and licensed lawyer, with expertise in criminal, administrative, non-profit, ethics, and lactation-related law. Liz offers in-home lactation consultations, and bedside care and teaching in two Baby-Friendly-designated hospitals.

She has been a leader in organizations for IBCLCs, breastfeeding promotion, and non-profit human milk banking. She authored the only textbook on legal and ethical issues for the IBCLC, and writes on health care ethics, equity, and conflict-of-interest in several books, blogs, and peer-reviewed journals.

She is a popular international conference speaker, offering practical tips with wit and wisdom for anyone who works with lactating and human milk-using families. Liz self-identifies as a cisgender hetero white woman with unearned privilege, and uses she/her/hers pronouns.

Tom Johnston is unique as a midwife and lactation consultant and the father of eight breastfed children. Recently retired after 27 years in the US Army, he is now an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Methodist University where he teaches, among other things, Maternal-Child Nursing and Nutrition. You may have heard him at a number of conferences at the national level, to include the Association of Woman’s Health and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), the International Lactation Consultant’s Association (ILCA), or perhaps at dozens of other conferences across the country. In his written work he routinely addresses fatherhood and the role of the father in the breastfeeding relationship and has authored a chapter on the role of the father in breastfeeding for “Breastfeeding in Combat Boots: A survival guide to breastfeeding in the military”.

Cynthia Good, MS Clinical Psychology, is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, Clinical Counselor, author, consultant, and internationally recognized speaker. She is the Director of LifeCircle Consulting, LLC and is Certified in Acute Traumatic Stress Management. She is based in the Seattle, Washington, USA area, where she formerly served as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University where she taught counseling skills and is a therapist at Sandbox Therapy Group where she works with children, adults, and families. Cynthia has a strong interest in the emerging field of lactational psychology. She brings the evidence and insights of psychology and lactation consulting to her presentations, providing information and teaching skills that are essential to understanding and effectively responding to the complex psychosocial realities of families living in diverse contexts. The focus of her presentations includes communication skills and counseling techniques for perinatal care providers; equity, diversity, and inclusion; infant feeding rhetoric; perinatal mental health; perinatal loss, grief, and trauma; ethics; serving as an expert witness in lactation-related court cases; cultural competence and humility; vitamin D; and more.