Celebrating Mother's Day 2017

This is seriously the most awesome thing I have read! What a good feeling, its feelings like Amaryah's is the reason why I love Centering so much! I haven't been on here in a while and pulled an 11 hr day today starting another successful Centering group. Pretty exciting! Then to come home and see this is an amazing feeling! Thank you so much for allowing us to be apart of this Mothers Day Campaign. Seriously WOW! Thank you Centering Healthcare Institute and Nicole you did an amazing job on this! You are a rockstar! Now I will unwind a bit and see what else is going on on here! 

Our next Mother's Day story comes from one of our own CHI team members - the fabulous Centering consultant, Sunshine Muse ! Like her name and smile, her story will warm your heart.

I remember being so happy to be a new mom. I’d had a midwife assisted birth, was successfully breastfeeding -because of my mom’s help- and was working a job that was family friendly and honoring of my son. Things were possible then and as a young woman working full-time and parenting it's really important to be able to see, and honestly say, that.

CHI is a family friendly environment that values parents who work and strives to improve both prenatal and postpartum experiences and outcomes. Although the little guy pictured here was a teenager by the time I came to work at CHI, the values that I had then –pertaining to work, family and social justice- are the values that I have now. I’m so happy to be working in and for a company that walks its talk and supports its families in living a balanced life, and it's clients in delivering a similar framework for the patients that they serve!

I wish Sunshine had posted this so I could give her the thumbs up.

Our next Mother's Day story comes from one of our new board members, Ashley Lanfer. Ashley participated in a CenteringPregnancy group before the birth of her third child and previously served as a strategy consultant for Centering Healthcare Institute. Now she is a board member! Currently, she is a partner at Wellspring Consulting, which provides consulting on strategy, market analysis, business planning and organizational design for the nonprofit sector. Here's Ashley's Centering story.

My Centering group was an unlikely sisterhood. We were Muslim and Christian, married and unmarried, poor and well off. Some of us were refugees from East Africa. One of us was a teenager. One mother had given birth to four children alone in her home and was now preparing for her first hospital birth in America. Several of the women spoke limited English - I speak some Kiswahili so that was often the best way for us to communicate. These were delightful women I felt privileged to know and learn from, but who I never would have met were it not for Centering and the context it created for meaningful connections across our differences. As well, I had never before been involved in the collection or recording of my own vital health statistics before. It was fantastic. I felt like, "why the heck don't we always do it this way?" The shared experience of mothering - especially during pregnancy and early parenting - is potent enough to dissolve most any differences that might otherwise divide women. Centering creates a context for those connections.

I love this so much! Sara is another one of my Centering patients and she is so amazing. She is actually the only one who isn't finding out the gender of her baby which makes it that more fun! I love to hear the way Karen and I can make awkward moments into not so awkward moments, this is another reason why I love Centering, because of the relationships that I get to build with these patients and even tho I don't know how they feel about the Centering group until maybe after they have filled out their evals, this shows that we must be doing something right. Thank you Sara, you are going to be an amazing Momma and I can't wait to meet Baby B! XOXO -Amy 

I was seriously so honored to be asked by nlewis is I wanted to participate in this Mothers Day Campaign by CHI. When 5/12 came I was at work, Kaiser Permanente Bellevue Medical Center and I logged onto Connects like I usually do and I saw the very last post for the Mothers Day Campaign. I started reading it and I was like oh my gosh this is so cool, it gave me chills and actually made me a bit emotional,  then the lead doc came over and sat in my chair and read the entire post, the entire week of Mothers Day posts from CHI and she thought that was pretty awesome.Then other coworkers were taking over my work station to read it so I decided to forward to our entire staff so they could have it because it is pretty cool!  I then forwarded it to my husband and my family and sent the link to all of management and upper management because they have had a critical role in the success and how far our clinic has come in such a short period of time, and I believe that communication is key with them also. I think its important for them to see things like this because sometimes management and upper management hear about complaints or things that we can fix as a clinic and not about the positive things unless brought to their attention. So its things like this with 8 stories for the Mothers Day Campaign from CHI and 6 of those stories are from our clinic, staff and patients. Again CHI thank you so much for your tremendous support day in and day out and your encouragement and thank you for including us in things like this to get our name out their as well. That was a pretty awesome feeling to see that on Friday. Your amazing Nicole and you did a great job on the Mothers Day Campaign! You're a rockstar!!!! (Wish I had a guitar emoji) lol thanks again! You are all the BEST!!!!!!