Ten years ago, Hannah Sokoloff-Rubin ’16 stood before a panel of judges on the top floor of the Allbritton Center and made her case for The Wesleyan Doula Project (WDP) to win a New Venture Award (then known as a Seed Grant) from the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. The room was hot, and Sokoloff-Rubin was sweating. All the momentum from the 2013-2014 school year—the student forum on reproductive politics co-taught by Hannah Cressy North ’13 and Kelsey Henry ’15, the relationships which WDP members had built with local reproductive healthcare clinics, the patients, the discussions, the phone numbers, the spreadsheets—culminated in that moment. Without funding, there was no guarantee that the WDP would continue. But Sokoloff-Rubin shouldn’t have worried. They won the grant, which laid the groundwork for the Project as we know it today. 

Just last Sunday, April 28, 2024, Sokoloff-Rubin and nine other WDP alumni returned to that same room on the top floor of Allbritton to celebrate the project’s 10-year anniversary. 

“How often do you want to do a thing, and set out to do it, and it gets done?” Sokoloff-Rubin said, addressing the 2024 WDP cohort. “None of this would matter if you all weren’t here. We were doing a thing that was just a pipe dream, and now it’s real.”

It certainly is real. Today, the WDP is made up of 30 student volunteer doulas, all of whom have been trained to provide emotional, physical, and informational support to people making choices about their reproductive health. Inspired by the success of the New York City Doula Project, the volunteers take shifts assisting with surgical abortions at Planned Parenthood West Hartford and Hartford GYN. They talk to patients, sit with them during and after procedures, and help with strategies for pain management. 

Outside their clinic partnerships, the WDP assembles aftercare kits, offers resources for University students seeking reproductive care, and fundraises for the Connecticut Reproductive, Equity, Access, and Choice (REACH) fund. As a student group, they have received a series of University grants and awards, including the 2023-2024 Jewett Center for Community Partnerships (JCCP) Political Engagement Fund, the 2023-2024 JCCP Innovation Fund, and a 2024 Excellence in Leadership Award from the Office of Student Involvement. 

At the 10-year anniversary event on Sunday, past and present WDP doulas enjoyed tofu pad thai and a career panel discussion. They reflected on the value of doula work and reproductive justice in a collegiate setting.

“It is remarkable what just being there will do,” Sokoloff-Rubin said. “There are moments where I didn’t say the right thing, or I wish I said something else, or there wasn’t a right thing to say. And I was shocked at how someone appreciated it.”

Wesleyan Doula Project Co-Coordinator Sophie Raiskin-Wood ’25 emphasized the importance of empathy and compassion in reproductive healthcare.

“Part of the justice component to me is bringing in humanity, because so much of reproductive healthcare has become medicalized and institutionalized,” Raiskin-Wood said. “Being a friendly face and a hand to hold, bringing the human aspects back into [reproductive healthcare], is a form of justice.” 

Many of the alumni who had gathered at the event said that the ethos of the WDP had shaped their post-graduation careers. Eija Kent ’19 is a medical student on track to become an OB/GYN; Ada Moses ’19 is a clinical psychology PhD candidate specializing in the overlap between reproductive health and mental health; Isabelle Koral ’23 is a clinical research coordinator at an adolescent healthcare center; and Jessica Brandon ’20 leads online abortion doula training for a nonprofit based in New York. Although not actively working in reproductive healthcare, Lucy de Lotbiniere ’20, Grace Sanfurd ’20, Natalie May ’18, and Louisa Winchell ’18 all agreed that the skills they built with the WDP are useful in their daily lives.

“I learned a lot of technical skills by being a doula, but it also taught me so much about emotional work and how to build relationships,” Kent said.

Lena Ostroy Harp ’25, a student volunteer hoping to pursue a career as a healthcare provider, takes pride in the concrete impact of the WDP.

“The Doula Project is the most important thing I do at Wesleyan,” Ostroy Harp said. “When you leave campus, and you go and put yourself in a situation where you’re helping people, it’s very grounding. Really tangible. There’s a lot of talk at Wesleyan about what’s right and what’s good, but not so much action, always. And I think that the Doula Project is very actionable. What we care about, which is abortion access and having safe abortions, is exactly what we’re doing.”

One former Doula Project Coordinator, Lila Lifton ’22, agreed that their involvement in the WDP helped them think about their positionality beyond the University bubble.

“[The Doula Project] was one of the only experiences I was having at Wesleyan where I was really thinking about myself in relation to the world,” Lifton said. “[I had to ask] how am I useful in this room? How am I harmful? What do I represent?”

Several current doulas raised concerns about feeling inadequate or anxious about supporting patients through procedures, particularly because many patients are around the same age as them. In response, the alumni emphasized that the students’ nonmedical background is part of what centers the WDP in compassion, learning, and empathy.

“[There’s a] balance between both being this sturdy presence in the room that can be grounding, that can translate medical knowledge and say, ‘I know what’s going to happen. And let me be here with you. Let me answer questions that you have,’” Moses said. “But then [there is] also the flip side of saying, ‘I’m a student, too, we’re just kind of figuring it out.’”

Other alumni reiterated the importance of action and selflessness in doula work.

“Your self is at the door,” Sanfurd said. “And that’s a skill, that’s a hard thing to do. But it’s a very important thing. You’re in these situations, people are frustrated and angry, [but] my self, whatever I want in this moment, isn’t important. What’s important is what’s going on [in front of me].”

In the WDP’s 10 years at the University, there has been no shortage of action and engagement. They have led doula training sessions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Williams College, all of which have established their own chapters of the Project. Even when student doulas on campus were barred from clinics by the COVID-19 pandemic, Lifton helped keep the Project alive by doubling down on reproductive healthcare resources for students on campus. More recently, the WDP provided doula training for nine first-year medical students from the UConn School of Medicine.

“Thank you, all of you, for taking our baby [the Doula Project], raising it, and continuing to make it thrive,” Moses said. “It gives us so much joy to be able to see this still happening. It’s cool to imagine 10 years from now, maybe 20 years from now, who knows, that you will train more people, and they will train more people, [and it will continue to grow].”

With high hopes for the future of reproductive justice at the University, the WDP Co-Coordinators—Raiskin-Wood, Olivia Andrews ’24, Lauren Tran-Muchowski ’25, Sanaa Mia ’26, and Chiara Mapp ’26—won’t let their momentum fizzle out any time soon. For more information about abortion resources and justice, students can use the WDP form, visit their website, or speak with one of the many dedicated volunteer doulas on campus.

Sophie Jager can be reached at sjager@wesleyan.edu.