About Us.
Our Mission.
Our mission is to create safe, inclusive, and wellness-centered spaces where community support of reproductive health, conception, birth, and postpartum helps to unveil well individuals and families.
Our Vision.
We will create an exceptional, client-centered continuum of reproductive wellness for a diverse clientele. Our efforts will focus on creating a significant impact on improving the health of people in our region by providing the highest quality of wellness and reproductive care.
Our Values.
We Support.
We Educate.
We Respect.
We Support. Recognizing that birth is a powerful and life-changing experience, we strive to provide a trusting, private, and peaceful environment for our clients to feel supported and empowered. We’re also dedicated to hearing the concerns of our families and to walking alongside them towards a healthier community birth culture.
We Educate. By continuously educating ourselves, we can educate the community on evidence-based best practices in birth and wellness. Educating our clients increases awareness of and confidence in our body’s potential. This also decreases the fear of and doubt in its abilities. We’ll develop relationships to educate, engage and advocate about the benefits of physiological birth and birth center care in our community.
We Respect. While treating every client with respect, compassion and sensitivity at all times, we will provide care to women, families, and birth workers of all ages, races, sexual orientations, religions, and socioeconomic status. We constantly strive to be inclusive with our outreach efforts and service to people from communities that suffer health disparities including people with limited incomes, people of color, people with disabilities and gender non-conforming and LGBTQ+ people.
Our Journey.
Founders Met & Became Partners
Birth Center Inception
Became Official with the State of South Carolina
Traveled to Minneapolis, MN for How to Start a Birth Center Workshop
Signed Official Partnership Agreement
Search for WBB Home Began
Our Story.
Tashona and Nicole met through birth work in 2021 and quickly realized they had very similar birth and business philosophies. They initially began supporting each other’s doula clients, then formed a partnership offering business mentorship to fellow doulas. They soon learned that they also shared a dream to open a birth center offering women’s wellness, reproductive health, and out-of-hospital birth options to their community. Upon this discovery, they immediately went into research mode and confirmed a lot of what they already knew, that the Greater Charlotte area is a birth center desert and was in dire need of alternative birth options. In March 2022, they took the first step towards making this dream a reality and have been working diligently to open the first doula-owned birth center in South Carolina ever since. They are passionate about creating community birth options to improve maternal and infant outcomes in a safe and inclusive space, families gaining access to holistic resources for reproductive wellness, and families getting to birth the way they desire without judgment, and feeling supported, respected, and honored.
About Tashona.
When Tashona was having children over 20 years ago, she didn’t know she had options. All she knew was “you get pregnant, go to your OB/GYN to watch your pregnancy for safety, and have your baby at the local hospital.” She remembers intuitively wanting an experience that was different from what was “the usual” but that seemed abnormal and so out of reach. Everyone she knew that had birthed a baby before her, encouraged her that “the usual” way was the best way. Her husband’s biggest concern was for her safety and comfort, and from everything he’d heard that could best be achieved at the hospital. Fast forward several years, and babies later, after pursuing a career change into massage therapy, she fell in love with perinatal massage. As she learned about how beneficial massage was to the pregnant body, she also heard the word doula for the first time in her 30+ years of life and her world was forever changed.
Becoming a doula opened her eyes to the world of birth. She learned that the desire she had for her birth experiences was not abnormal at all… in fact it was beautiful, safe, and very achievable. From then on, her goal became to help anyone she could to achieve THEIR ideal birth experience. While working as a doula, she quickly realized that when a woman births where they want, the way they want, and are supported by whom they want she experiences birth in a profound way. It didn’t take long to see that for many, that may not look like what has become “the usual” route. She also learned about safe community based birth options and that there’s not enough access to those other options available to birthing families… and so her dream to open a birth center was born.
About Nicole.
Nicole is pretty sure she came out of the womb with birth in her spirit. For as long as she can remember, she was obsessed with pregnancy and childbirth. At a very young age, she knew she wanted to be an obstetrician. She had her life planned out… She was going to follow the path to medical school, which would lead to her dream of delivering babies. Life took a different turn and medical school never happened. However, when she had her first child, she knew exactly how she wanted her birth to go. She walked into the hospital full of confidence; she had taken all the classes to have an unmedicated birth, had her birth plan in hand, and her support team was by her side. In spite of all of this, she would have an emergency cesarean that would later lead to a second cesarean because “once a c-section, always a c-section.”
It wasn’t until 13 years later when she was planning to have more children that she came across the word doula. Doula??? What is that? So, she began researching like a madwoman… A |doo-luh| is a trained professional who provides non-judgmental physical, emotional, and educational support to families before, during, and after childbirth. THIS! This is what she wanted to do and actually had been unknowingly doing for friends and family for years. She could feel in her spirit that this was where her purpose and passion would come together. Through learning as much as she could about providing support to families, and even more on pregnancy and birth, she came to the conclusion that her first birth experience could have had a very different outcome. If she had known then, all that she was learning… that she had a voice and it mattered, could ask questions, was able to make decisions that felt right for her and her baby, and so much more, then she could’ve had a real shot at having the birth she worked so hard for. Although that never came to fruition, she was now empowered with the knowledge to help others have the birthing experience they desired and it didn’t have to be with an OB/GYN, or even at a hospital. She quickly realized that there is another way, a safer way… and so her dream to open a birth center was born.
