Lesley Everest has been practising as a birth, postpartum, and end-of-life doula in Montreal over the last 26 years. She is the founder of MotherWit Doula Care and MotherWit Doula Training. Lesley's professional background in many forms of somatic/emotional support therapies and inter-spiritual ministry informs her work as a teacher of human resilience , as do the births and parenting of her own four kids, and her experience of healing from cancer. She has learned over the years that a good birth and early parenting experience is less about goals being met and more about feeling safe and respected. Lesley believes that the journey into family-hood matters for all members, serving as a transformational event that has the power to shape early parenting and the next generations. Lesley's diplomatic and collaborative nature has made her a sought after speaker in the North American birth and parenting conference circuits, as well as a facilitator of workshops geared towards soft skills building for medical care providers. Lesley is resourced by long walks in nature, late night dancing with friends to ‘80’s music, and visits to the spa.

Laurel Wilson, IBCLC, CLE, CCCE, CLD is a TEDx and international speaker, author, pregnancy and lactation expert, and consultant. She served as the Executive Director of Lactation Programs for CAPPA, the Childbirth and Postpartum Professional Association for 16 years and now is on the Senior Advisor Board. She served on the Board of Directors for the United States Breastfeeding Committee from 2016-2019. She also is on the Advisory Board for InJoy Health. She owns MotherJourney, focusing on training perinatal professionals on integrative and holistic information regarding pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. She has her degree in Maternal Child Health: Lactation Consulting and is an internationally board certified lactation consultant. As the co-author of two books, The Attachment Pregnancy and The Greatest Pregnancy Ever, original Editor of the CAPPA Lactation Educator Manual, and contributing author to Round the Circle: Doulas Talk About Themselves, she loves to blend today’s recent scientific findings with the mind/body/spirit wisdom. Laurel has been joyfully married to her husband for nearly three decades and has two wonderful grown sons, whose difficult births led her on a path towards helping emerging families create positive experiences. She believes that the journey into parenthood is a life-changing rite of passage that should be deeply honored and celebrated.

Ihotu Jennifer Ali, MPH, LMT, CLC (she/her) is a doula, public health educator, researcher, and integrative massage therapist specializing in myofascial release therapies including the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy®, Craniosacral Therapy, Prenatal, and Infant Massage as a Spinning Babies Aware Practitioner®. She is founder and owner of Black Moon Bodywork, LLC which offers massage therapy blended with health coaching in integrative and indigenous practices to support hormone balance, digestion, sexual and reproductive health, and reproductive justice.

Ihotu’s decade of experience in femme and family health includes years as a DONA certified birth doula and lactation counselor, prenatal yoga teacher and dancer, rape crisis counselor, Institute for Integrative Nutrition coach, and director of pre-conception health programs funded by the March of Dimes. She has collaborated with midwives and physicians in Haiti, Nigeria, Congo, and Morocco, and worked in health policy and research with the U.S. Congress, Clinton Foundation, United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Raised between Minnesota, New York City, and West Africa with respect for both indigenous and evidence-based medicine, Ihotu strives to offer innovative care that is affordable, consent- and trauma-informed, gender fluid and ancestrally rooted. Her writing, public speaking, and coaching brings together emerging science in hormones and gut-brain health, functional medicine, Reproductive Justice and Afrofuturism movements. She offers an intercultural commentary on the busy modern lifestyles, social pressures, and unresolved trauma often at the root of today’s chronic health conditions.

Associate Professor Treasure McGuire is a clinical pharmacist, educator, and researcher. She holds two senior appointments in her hospital role (as Assistant Director of Pharmacy, Practice and Development, Mater Health Brisbane) with 1) Bond University Medical School (as Associate Professor of Pharmacology and 2) The University of Queensland School of Pharmacy (as Associate Professor, Clinical). She is passionate about improving the consumer voice and health outcomes for mothers and babies through the development and access to more effective and safer approaches towards medicines use.

Treasure’s research is translational and evidence-based, focusing on patient centred-care and quality use of medicines in women’s and newborn health, medicines information, medication safety and complementary medicines. She has published widely and authored the chapter on Safe use of drugs while breastfeeding In Brodribb W, ed. Breastfeeding management in Australia, 5th ed, Melbourne: Australian Breastfeeding Association, 2019. She is a regular invited speaker at national and international conferences, with over 60 keynote addresses. In recognition of her services to medicines information, she received the Lilly International Fellowship in Hospital Pharmacy. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Sr Eileen Pollard Medal (Mater Research-UQ) for excellence in incorporating research into clinical care provision.

Jacqueline Kincer is the founder of Holistic Lactation where she runs a busy practice, manufacturers herbal supplements for lactation, and supports breastfeeding families worldwide. She's also the host of the podcast Breastfeeding Talk: Milk. Mindset. Motherhood. and creator of the online breastfeeding community, The Nurture Collective. Jacqueline's passion has been to create functional breastfeeding outcomes and expand access to lactation knowledge across the globe.

Shel works part time for the NHS in northwest England, and has four adolescents.

In addition to this, she runs a small private IBCLC practice specialising in the unsettled baby, those with faltering weight and those who are formula fed, and also holds a variety of consultant and trustee roles in various national and international organisations for advocacy and education around infant feeding; these include being Clinical Director for the breastfeeding support app AnyaHealth, being co-chair of Nursing Matters, an advocacy organisation for the breastfed infant, and being vice-chair of the UK Association for Milk Banking.

Shel has been on the development committee for 3 NICE guidelines including one on Faltering Growth, has co-authored 3 Cochrane systematic reviews, and written a book “Why Infant Formula Feeding Matters” (2022). In 2021 Shel began work towards a PhD in further understanding how best to support families with unsettled babies in universal services, which she conducts part time alongside her other commitments.

She teaches in person and online, both in her NHS role and in the consultant roles, and thoroughly enjoys sharing the knowledge she has acquired to improve the experience of families everywhere.

Denise Love is a dynamic international speaker and educator. She is passionate about life and compelled to support women through their many transitions in life. With an ever developing interest in life and death, she walks the path with many around death, particularly women whose babies die, either in utero, at birth, or soon thereafter. With a Masters degree in nursing, living and working in remote villages in Asian countries as well as Australia, she is determined that women and babies be treated respectfully within their cultural expectations.

As a childbirth educator and an instigator of the introduction and training of doulas in Australia 20 years ago, Denise identified the vital need for birthing women to ""find their voice"" and trust their ancient internal ability to birth their babies. This recognition was stimulated by the developed world's highly structured interventionist and medicalised birthing paradigms and seemingly inflexible protocols and practices. Birth matters and so does the way we all die. Combining direct language, ritual and acknowledgement of grief when a baby dies, Denise brings a refreshing attitude and approach. In her early years, practising as a Registered Nurse in remote indigenous communities, Denise gained valuable insight into how to trust our innate ability to birth, live fully and die. Denise's view has since been further reinforced through her work with vulnerable marginalised villagers in developing countries, where death is accepted as just a normal part of living.

Dr. Lesley A. Tarasoff is a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is a leading scholar on the perinatal health of women with disabilities; Dr. Tarasoff is a co-author of the first known clinical practice guidelines on labour, delivery, and postpartum care for people with physical disabilities (see Berndl et al., 2021, JOGC) and of several systematic reviews and studies on the perinatal health outcomes and care experiences of women with disabilities in Canada. Primarily drawing on qualitative methodologies, her broader program of research aims to understand and address disparities and inequities in reproductive, perinatal, and mental health and health care experienced by often-stigmatized and marginalized groups, namely women with disabilities and sexual minority women. She holds a PhD in Public Health Sciences, with a Specialization in Women’s Health, from the University of Toronto. She is an advocate of midwifery care and even more so after the birth of her son in 2021.

Cecilia Jevitt is the Midwifery Director and a tenured associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine. From 2013 to 2018, she directed the Yale School of Nursing’s Midwifery and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner master’s degree programs. She has done capacity-building teaching and curriculum consultations in Switzerland, Laos, China and Ghana.
Jevitt studied midwifery at Emory University. Her 1993 doctorate in applied medical anthropology is from the University of South Florida. She established an academic division of midwifery with the University of South Florida College of Medicine while jointly appointed to the Colleges of Nursing and Public Health.
She is an elected Fellow of the American College of Nurse-Midwives and is the At Large Member of the FACNM Board. Jevitt was a Florida Nurses Association Great 100 Nurse in 2009, the 2010 Reviewer of the Year for the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, the University of South Florida Department of Anthropology’s Distinguished Alumni in 2012, and a 2014 Connecticut Nightingale Excellence in Nursing Award winner.
Jevitt’s scholarship focuses on perinatal weight gain optimization and integrating obesity prevention and management into women’s health especially the perinatal and lactation periods.

Mary Ryngaert is a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner since 1987 and an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant since 2000. She received her MSN in the Primary Care of Children at Catholic University in Washington, DC. In her clinic at the University of Florida, she sees families for breastfeeding issues for the duration of the breastfeeding journey and provides education for pediatric residents. She is active in the local breastfeeding coalition and serves as a consultant/coordinator for the hospital Baby Friendly program. She has a special interest in supporting the development of peer counselors, especially women of color, to provide breastfeeding support within the community. She served as the Chair for the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP) Breastfeeding Special Interest Group for six years and is a delegate to the US Breastfeeding Committee for NAPNAP . She was a co-author for the 2018 update to the NAPNAP Position Statement on Breastfeeding.