It’s About Time: Convening & Collaboration on Doula Time Tracking & Compensation

Full Description: Traditionally, doulas have been paid on a per birth model, where the doula is paid a lump sum for all work related to a birth. While some private doulas may provide the majority of their care during labor/delivery, community doula program models typically involve significantly more client contact. However, this can create difficulty in determining the most appropriate compensation structure, particularly in the increasingly common context of state funding for doula care. The SisterWeb San Francisco Community Doula Network and the SHARE Program at UC Berkeley have been collaborating on a time-use project to understand how SisterWeb doulas work and the time they allocate to different activities. HealthConnect One, a birthworker training, program development, and advocacy organization, is collaborating with SisterWeb and the SHARE program to evaluate doula time-use and compensation structures. Our workshop will: 1) introduce participants to the time-use project, its results, and how SisterWeb is implementing lessons learned; and 2) provide a facilitated interactive discussion space for participants to reflect on next steps in evaluating doula time-use, compensation structures, and the best ways to ensure the provision of high-quality doula care. Marna Armstead, SisterWeb’s Executive Director, will introduce SisterWeb, a network of culturally congruent community doulas and birth workers from and for Black, Pacific Islander, and Latina/o/x communities in San Francisco. SisterWeb provides care free of charge to their clients, who are often experiencing the health, social, and economic effects of structural inequities. SisterWeb doulas are hired as full-time employees, not on the per birth model, and SisterWeb believes that this structure more appropriately accounts for and compensates the doulas for their work. In February 2021, SisterWeb doulas tracked their daily work activities over the course of a month. Alli Cuentos, SisterWeb’s Director of Evaluations, will describe how SisterWeb conducted the time-use project, focusing on the creative best practices she used to sustain the doulas’ engagement and lessons learned for implementing this type of data collection in a small community doula organization. Results from this project emphasize the wide variety of work that SisterWeb doulas do in addition to direct client care, the variation in tasks, and the unpredictable nature of doula work. Jennet Arcara, Postdoctoral Researcher at SHARE, will review the results and introduce the next steps that the team is taking. Finally, the facilitated discussion will be led by Zainab Sulaiman from HealthConnect One and will focus on: What is the best way to compensate community doulas? How can funding and compensation structures account for the variety and types of work that doulas do? How do we reconcile doulas’ status as adjacent to the healthcare system with their increasing participation in the healthcare system through new Medicaid and other funding mechanisms?

Abbreviated Description: Community doula program models typically involve more contact with clients than private doulas, which can create difficulty in determining the most appropriate compensation structure for community doulas. SisterWeb San Francisco Community Doula Network and the SHARE Program at UC Berkeley collaborated on a time-use project to understand how SisterWeb doulas allocate time to different activities for their clients. Our workshop will: 1) introduce the time-use project, its results, and how SisterWeb is implementing lessons learned; and 2) provide a facilitated interactive discussion for participants to reflect on next steps in evaluating doula time-use, compensation structures, and the best ways to ensure provision of high-quality doula care.