Doulas Doing Business · About the host

I trained doulas for decades before I built a summit about the business.

I'm Robin Elise Weiss. Every September I host Doulas Doing Business, a free three-day virtual summit for doulas, childbirth educators, and lactation consultants.

I attended my first birth as a doula in 1990. I have spent the years since then at births, in training rooms, and on the phone with doulas who knew how to support a labor and had no idea how to price a package. This page is the short version of who I am and why the summit exists.

Who I am

I finished DONA International's birth doula trainer course in 1994 and taught my first doula training on my own in 1996. Since then I have attended more than 1,500 births and trained more than 10,000 doulas. I am also a public health educator, which is where my habit of asking "what does the evidence say" comes from.

The doulas I trained kept coming back to me with the same questions, and almost none of them were about labor. They were about contracts, pricing, finding clients, insurance, and how to keep doing this work without running themselves into the ground. Doula training teaches birth. It rarely teaches the business, and most doulas learn that part the hard way, alone, after the training ends.

I believe in abundance over competition. There is enough birth work for everyone, and doulas do better when they back each other up instead of guarding their corner of town. That belief runs through everything I teach, and it is the reason the summit is free.

Why I started the summit

I started Doulas Doing Business in 2023 because I wanted one place, once a year, where working birth workers could get short, practical business sessions from people who have built real practices, without paying for a ticket. Not a conference. Three days of sessions you can watch between clients, taught by doulas, educators, and business people who have done the work themselves.

I am one of the speakers each year, not the only teacher. The summit belongs to the people who attend it, and every year it has grown.

2023The first summit. 15 speakers over three days.

202425 speakers, and a bigger community around them.

202527 speakers, the largest lineup so far.

Year four2026The Long Game: building a practice that lasts for decades, not months.

About 1,500 birth workers register every year.

Doulas, childbirth educators, and lactation consultants, most of them running a practice right now.

What the summit is now

Doulas Doing Business is a free three-day virtual summit held every September. Sessions are short and practical, and every speaker is asked to teach first. People come for the business questions: getting booked, getting paid, setting boundaries, and building a practice that is still standing in ten years.

Registration is free. Each session is open to watch for a window after it airs, and an All Access Pass is available each year for anyone who wants to keep the recordings.

Next: September 14 to 16, 2027

Registration opens closer to the date. Put your name on the list and I will send you the speaker lineup and registration details before anyone else sees them.

Between summits

The summit is three days a year. The Doula Mentoring Collective is where I work with doulas the rest of the year: weekly live Doula Office Hours calls, Deep Dive trainings on the topics doulas are actually asking about, and a group of people building practices that last.

Join the Doula Mentoring Collective

Robin Elise Weiss, PhD, MPH, CD(DONA)

Host, Doulas Doing Business