Hello and Welcome! Below is the description for the first annual Midwifery Mentorship Program.

In order to enroll, please send me an email at midwives@fridacare.com by 12/10/2026.

There are so many details on this page to take in and consider, read on below!

The Offering: 

A ten month mentorship program which will primarily be A Processing Group. This group is open to new midwives, student midwives, midwives who feel new, midwives who were once new. This group will run from January 2027 through December 2027 with two months off (July/August) for summer travel break.

I was once a new midwife:

The medicine in this kind of group work is what I dreamed about having in my panicked first five years of practicing as a midwife. In the beginning I felt such a heavy sense of responsibility, such a heavy sense of imposter syndrome, that I might as well have introduced myself to my patients as Hi, my name is Shira and I will be playing the role of midwife today, I’m an understudy of course, I mean I’m sure you immediately got that sense, but the show must go on and so here I am la di da!  Meanwhile, the drumbeat of self doubt and chronic mid-level panic was the backdrop to every moment of my professional life. I thought about quitting almost all of the time and honestly only did not due to the heavy weight of crushing student debt.  I questioned my judgment around why I had ever thought that I would be capable of holding this level of responsibility for people’s lives. Throughout it all, I kept showing up for patients with love and warmth and psuedo- confidence (it certainly wasn’t their responsibility to reassure me and mercifully through the haze of anxiety at least I absolutely knew that!) but I kept quietly questioning my capacity.  And then the strangest thing happened: After five years in practice I showed up one day to work and felt competent. It was like a switch was flipped, I believed in myself in the role of midwife. I was no longer the shaky understudy, I was clearly the most obvious choice for the part. 

That confidence was hard won. It was brutal for me and I know that this experience can be quite common for new midwives. I would like to walk with you through some of that brutality so you feel less alone than I did. 

The Background:

I’ve always been envious of my therapist friends who receive supervision as a part of their professional lives, within a supervision group as well as in their one on one sessions with their supervisors. When they have difficult cases, they have a structure to process and talk through their questions and address where they may have been triggered or personally impacted with an experienced facilitator and with a group of their peers.  What a gift to my beloved therapist friends and ultimately for their patients.  Having a space to clear the internal air so to speak means creating space to hold the next person’s story.  Midwives are not so different from therapists in terms of how we hold space for our patients and attune ourselves to their needs, listening to the stories and circumstances churning inside of them, guiding them towards their expanding selves in this transformative moment of their lives.

After nearly 15 years of practice, I have finally arrived at a moment in my career where I feel like I have amassed the experience and confidence and competence to create this offering of a space for midwives.  I have absolutely loved mentoring the newer midwives at my Bellevue Hospital practice in our recent practice expansion, getting to discuss and debrief the nuances of the foundation of the care we provide, getting to guide them through more and less acute clinical scenarios and then break down the moment-to-moment decisions that we made, and consider potential tweaks should a similar clinical scenario arise in the future. Additionally, I have loved debriefing and processing the emotional components of our work including the relationships and experiences we have with our patients.  I have been inspired by their fresh perspectives, I have been reminded of the core magic of this work we have chosen to do, I have been humbled as I’ve discovered dusty corners of burn-out inside of myself that have not seen the light for quite awhile. I have felt a renewed hope as I’ve gotten to be around these newer midwives. It has been an honor to mentor them and to learn from them. 

I would like to formalize this practice and open it up to more midwives. I would like to open this up to you.  

Let’s get real and be honest, why trust me to hold this space for you? 

My vision is that this mentorship processing group will be nourishing, generative, collaborative, sustaining. 

I am a seeker, I have chosen to walk my karmic journey, I have gone through the narrow place and come out the other side many times and I know that road is winding and grief will find me again. I find strength in this version of living, I find resilience, I find purpose and stimulation and hope. 

I seek to feel my feelings, I seek to hold the feelings of my friends and patients and loved ones. I do not always succeed with perfect precision and so I work to figure out what got hard, to see what feelings of defensiveness or protection or weariness seem to be getting in my way and I try again. 

I am a generally upbeat person, optimistic and creative about the possibilities of improving systems around me, funny and playful and also deep and intense. I’m not here to have a simple life, I am here to have a real one. I love questioning the conventional, seeking righteousness while combatting systems of oppression, consistently striving for equity, striving for relational parity, for human rights. I have considered myself an activist, I have considered myself anti-establishment, I have established myself as a person who chooses to deeply commit to the work of improving inequity in every community of which I am a part. I love brainstorming together, I love working collaboratively, I love making art with other humans.  I am a theater kid at heart, my deep desire to harmonize onstage with others is my secret/not so secret personality. 

I bring this balance of hope and depth and passion to the work that I do with my patients. In a public hospital setting we do not have time to go as deeply as those who do in private practice. There is a loss in that, professionally, personally and qualitatively. We are not in charge of our time and structure, we show up and we do the work. And yet, after dabbling in other realms, I have chosen to devote myself to working within this public health structure. I understand that my constraints are time and institutional protocols and so I have chosen to do my best to take advantage of every minute I have with my patients. This looks like: Showing up warmly, quieting my energy and dampening my agenda so that my patients energetically feel that there is space for them to ask their real questions and receive the care that they need and deserve. This looks like: Ongoing consent in the moments when I am physically assessing someone, communicating clearly and transparently throughout the course of a labor in order to increase the possibility of patients integrating information in real time, with the intention of preventing rumination postpartum about what actually happened in their labors in those wild and psychedelic sleep-deprived-cycling-through -all-hours-with- no-true-break-days.  This looks like: Providing “homebirth” level answers for my patients when they ask about remedies and relief from common discomforts of pregnancy during prenatal care as well as taking their complaints seriously every single time, always taking the time to rule out pathology without abandoning them to their very real - though benign - symptoms of pregnancy.  Not cutting corners, just doing it all a little faster and with a lot of verve. 

My deepest goal as a midwife to those whose labor I am attending is to provide respectful, dignified care so that – regardless of the way the baby comes out - their experience is atraumatic. 

These goals that I have honed, these values that I have lived by, I would like to infuse them into the work that I do in this mentorship group.  Let’s find each other as we are, let’s create space to go to our raw and vulnerable spots as practitioners, and let’s be sure to cinch up before we leave the sacred space of releasing what we need to release on a biweekly basis.

The Details:

*This will be a closed ongoing cohort (not a drop-in group) that will meet every other week on Tuesday evenings from 6-8pm for approximately ten months which feels fitting given our expectation around a typical gestation of a human. This group will begin on Tuesday 1/12/27 and the last day of our group will be Tuesday 12/21/27. A full list of dates of the group are listed at the bottom of this document. 

*The expectation is that people will try to make most groups but of course as midwives our strength is our flexibility with each other as we navigate the world around us!

*Each group will follow a structure that is both spacious and contained. We will start with an Opener, we will end with a Closing, and the middle time will be co-created, a space for sharing and supporting and learning and stretching. 

*The group will primarily be on Zoom with an option for in person communing. Nothing beats the energy of in person exchanges.  Nothing is more convenient than gathering online. We will begin online and consider interspersing in person gatherings after we see what works and doesn’t work for the individuals who will comprise the to be determined magical cohort. 

*The fee for this group will be $350/month x 10 months, or if you want to pay up front it will be discounted at $3200. In addition to the time we’ll spend together, each cohort member will have four 1:1 45 minute zoom sessions with me to be scheduled at your discretion at a mutually feasible time for us both.  If this fee will not work for you, please send me an email and we will discuss what will work (This is a great resource for thinking about the astonishingly difficult topic of how to think about your relationship to money and how it makes sense to spend it).

*My deepest desire is to create a space that feels warm and nourishing to all midwives of all genders and races and cultures and class backgrounds and sexual orientations. The safest space is the space where every human is seen and celebrated for who and how they are. 

*In order to enroll, please send me an email at midwives@fridacare.com by 12/10/2026.  Please also feel free to email me with any questions in advance of enrolling.  My goal is to get a group together for 8-12 midwives, so if this appeals to you and you want to bring a friend even better! Please feel free to spread the word and share this information with your beloveds! 

Dates for the Processing Group:

1/12/27

1/26/27

2/9/27

2/23/27

3/9/27

3/23/27

4/6/27

4/20/27

5/4/27

5/18/27

6/1/27

6/15/27

6/29/27

(Off until September, dates resume below)

9/7/27

9/21/27

10/5/27

10/19/27

11/2/27

11/16/27

11/30/27

12/14/27