8:10-9:10am Madeline LeBlanc & Breea Carter Doula Down the Bayou: What Happens When the Community Serves Itself

Breea is a Dominican American birth doula and Operations Director at Mary's Hands Network, Louisiana's largest volunteer-based doula organization. Breea brings to this work not just bilingual fluency but a lived cultural understanding of what it means to navigate systems, including healthcare systems, in a language that was not built for you. That foundation shapes how she supports Spanish-speaking families through pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period, and informs her perspective on where language access breaks down and what doulas can actually do about it.

At the organizational level, she leads community doula program operations, and general nonprofit operations including efforts to expand culturally and linguistically responsive care for underserved communities across Louisiana. She holds additional training in lactation counseling and perinatal mental health, and her work has been recognized by Volunteer Louisiana with the 2025 Champion of Service Award. Breea brings to this session both the insider knowledge of what happens in the birth room and a systems-level perspective on why language access remains one of the most persistent and under addressed gaps in perinatal care.