Founders
DOMINO KIRKE-BADGLEY
CD (CHB), Full-Spectrum Doula, Co-founder of CHB
domino@carriagehousebirth.com
“My role as a doula is my medicine. It nourishes me as much as I nourish and care for the families I work with.”
“Witnessing people give birth stops time. Holding that kind of space for families forces you into your body, the same way it does for the person giving birth. In the birth space we’re forced to be extraordinarily present. We’re all equal.”
For as long as Domino Kirke-Badgley can remember, she’s felt protective over pregnant people. Originally from London she’s called New York home since the mid-’90s and spent years performing and recording as a musician and teaching Gyrotonic body work before shifting into doula work. A challenging birthing experience with her first child left Kirke-Badgley keenly aware of a huge gap in birth care. That realization would be a critical turning point: Kirke-Badgley set out to become the person she had needed by her side during her first birth.
After training with DONA International, Kirke-Badgley spent the first six years of her career as a doula immersed in birth work, attending around 50 births a year. She co-founded CHB in 2012 as a small collective of doulas, a scrappy operation out of a storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with potlucks, childbirth education classes, and support groups. They flourished and, as the need for doulas grew, in 2017 Kirke-Badgley and CHB began laying the foundation for an in-depth doula training program. Now, CHB has over fifty doulas on the roster and helping those doulas sustain themselves in their work is a driving force for Kirke-Badgley.
Kirke-Badgley sees birth as a threshold, one that, like any major life changing event, requires tenderness and care to cross. And it’s a role she believes has become, with the individualized ways in which we now exist, more essential than ever. Because birth takes a village to carry you through postpartum and far beyond into parenthood
In addition to being an experienced birth doula, Kirke-Badgley is also a childbirth educator, postpartum doula and doula mentor. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two dogs, and two kids, born twelve years apart.
LINDSEY BLISS
CD (CHB), Full-Spectrum Doula, Co-founder of CHB
lindseybliss.com
“Witnessing new souls entering our earthly realm feels like an honor and a privilege, one that never gets old. It’s a constant reminder of what’s possible.”
Lindsey Bliss has had exceptional childbirth support modeled for her since she was a toddler watching her mother teach Bradley childbirth education classes in their living room. An art school graduate, Bliss logged time in the restaurant business and as a model while simultaneously volunteering doing rape crisis counseling; that work would have many parallels to the birth and advocacy work she would shift into as a doula.
Bliss’s own rollercoaster journey with the birth of her first set of twins and the postpartum period that followed inspired her to sign up for doula training when they were six months old. Since becoming a birth doula in 2009 Bliss has supported well over 500 families and established a specialty in educating and supporting twin families like her own.
Bliss’s goal with every client is to ensure that the birth experience is something they are actively participating in versus something happening to them, and to help them engage in informed decision making. She sees each birth experience as entirely unique, like, she says, a fingerprint. The many significant challenges present for birthing families now in a healthcare system that puts profit over people makes Bliss that much more determined and focused on her work. Work that has become, says Bliss, amid a growing maternal mortality crisis, more critical than ever since it’s been proven that doulas create better birth outcomes.
Bliss lives in Queens with her very big family—seven children including two sets of back-to-back twins and a stepdaughter—and three rescue Chihuahuas.