AmeriCorps doula opportunities

As I said in my recent post, I wish more people knew about the opportunity to do maternal and child health work in AmeriCorps! (Still, I only found my job because I stumbled across it in the course of a massive AmeriCorps job search, so I understand why more people don't know about it.) There are amazing benefits to working for a good AmeriCorps program, not least of which is that your training is free. AmeriCorps programs are used to hiring people with relatively little training (although relevant experience doesn't hurt), so you are getting a huge resume's worth of experience for nothing up front. I became a Certified Doula and a Certified Breastfeeding Educator through my program. A good program (note that not all programs are good!) will also offer professional development opportunities, extra trainings, and opportunities to explore careers that are of interest to you. (AmeriCorps also offers you the opportunity to qualify for food stamps, although not everyone counts this as a plus.)

The program I worked for was part of the Community HealthCorps (not to be confused with the National Health Service Corps, which is for medical professionals with a clinical degree). Here's a list of the program locations, all located at federally funded community health centers. When I last knew - and this knowledge is several years old, so it may no longer be totally inaccurate - there were doula programs at the sites in Brooklyn, Denver, Seattle and Providence (although I no longer see the Providence site on the list, so sadly it may have closed). There was certainly discussion of training more, but I don't know if they have.

If you have any interest in health, some of these programs are great opportunities to get more experience. Some are aimed more at high school grads, others at college grads. My best advice, if you're looking, is to treat AmeriCorps the same way as you would treat any other job search. Look hard at the job, the supervisors, the program before you accept it. These programs are only as good as the organizations who run them, and since you're not going to get much money out of it you should be getting a great experience!

Edited to add, January 2011: After almost two years, I'm pleased that people are still finding this post and getting inspired by the opportunity to become a doula through AmeriCorps! Sometimes people e-mail me to ask for more information about doing one of these programs. While I am happy to talk to you about my experiences, I am now many years out of the program and don't know anything about the current programs available.

If you're interested in finding AmeriCorps doula programs, I suggest you try the following options:

1) Take a look at the Community HealthCorps link above and try to contact individual programs, or contact the Community HealthCorps national office directly;

2) Search the AmeriCorps program website for opportunities - unfortunately they don't seem to give you the option of keyword-searching program descriptions, so you would need to drill down looking for health-related programs and read through their descriptions to find ones that do maternal and child health/doula services.

The fastest and simplest way is probably to contact the national office directly; I encourage you to encourage them to make this information more easily accessible on the web! I would love to be able to link to a resource page with updated info on all of the programs.