What Doulas and Doula Organizations Need From Funders: A Free Guide

If you've ever sat across from a funder and felt the need to translate your own work into a language that wasn't built for it, this guide is for that exact moment.

Doulas reduce cesarean births by up to 39 percent. We shorten labor. We improve outcomes payers are already willing to reimburse for. The financial argument for doula care has been made and accepted, Medicaid now covers doula services in 26 states and DC, up from just 12 a little over a year ago. Hospitals are actively building doula partnerships. The system is coming to us.

What almost no one has funded is the sustainability of the people doing this work. Burnout, secondary trauma, and compassion fatigue are real costs of this field, and they are rarely named in a budget, let alone funded. Reimbursement covers a per-birth payment, not on-call time, not administrative hours, not a living wage. That gap is what pushes doulas out of a field that clearly works.

This guide exists to close that gap, from our side of the table.

What Doulas and Doula Organizations Need From Funders is a 22 page resource built by a doula, for doulas and doula organizations navigating funding and financial sustainability. It walks through the evidence base for why this work is fundable, breaks down exactly what Medicaid reimbursement covers and doesn't, and includes a practice sustainability calculator so you can see your own real margin before you build a budget or a proposal around a number that looks bigger than it is. It covers what a genuinely aligned funder looks like versus one that's interested but not there yet, how to think past grants as the only path to sustainability, and what your options are if you're not a 501(c)(3). It closes with ready-to-use scripts for the funder conversations you're actually having, and a checklist for vetting whether a funder relationship is one worth building.

This isn't written to hand to a funder. It's written to hand to yourself, before that conversation.

A few things worth knowing before you open it:

• It breaks down Medicaid doula reimbursement, state by state where the data exists, and exactly what it does and doesn't cover.
• It includes the same practice sustainability calculator formula as the companion piece for funders, so you can run your own numbers before you negotiate a rate or write a proposal.
• It has a full comparison of what a good, aligned funder looks like versus one that's interested but not yet aligned, plus a vetting checklist to bring into any funder conversation.
• It covers funding paths that don't require nonprofit status: fiscal sponsorship, individual practitioner grants, and building your own access fund as a private practitioner.
• It ends with ready-to-use scripts for cold outreach, renewal requests, and the "why not just rely on Medicaid" conversation.