What Organizational Doula Work Is

• Deep witnessing and accompaniment through transitions, not framework application
• Starts with assessment: what the organization already has, its history, cultural identity, strengths
• Builds emergent frameworks tailored to the specific team, broad enough to flex but tethered to history
• Psychological safety as a core pillar: enables trial-and-error culture and generative mistake-making
• Doula as “lantern holder”: outside perspective that makes sense of what teams can’t see from within
• Individual and collective work combined: leadership and team members addressed separately and together
• Tools are maps, not plans: flexible, multi-route, oriented toward a shared North star

Who It’s For and Key Use Cases

• Teams merging, experiencing leadership ruptures, or moving toward something new
• Organizations sunsetting or closing, including unexpected closures
• Coalitions forming across very different organizations (example: North Dakota anti-trafficking coalition bringing together law enforcement, nonprofits, faith groups, government)
• Teams in conflict: conflict held as generative, not something to squash
  • Ignored conflict snowballs, teams lose talent and the ability to dream together
  • Must be witnessed from outside by someone not in the conflict
• Conferences and gatherings: drop-in support, workshops, helping excited collaborators ground new ideas into actionable maps before they leave

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Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling

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Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com

Alice Ely is one of my favorite people to talk with, and I’ve been wanting to have her on the podcast for a long time. She’s the executive director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley, celebrating twenty-five years of the organization she leads. She’s also the person who funded my BIPOC and queer healthcare storytelling work through the Vermont Community Health Equity Partnership a few years back, so this conversation was a real coming-full-circle moment for me.

We talk about what it took for the Public Health Council to hold the VTCHEP grant in a way that served the communities it was meant for. We talk about: word-of-mouth outreach through networks the state would never have thought to use; fiscal sponsorship for organizations without institutional infrastructure; money upfront when grantees needed it; and more.

We talk about qualitative data being treated as unreliable inside healthcare settings. We talk about what it means when N is too small to report. And we talk about the medicalization of public health, and what happens when community health workers never leave the institutional walls of the systems that employ them.

If you’re a funder, a public health leader, a community-led practitioner, or someone trying to change how your traditionally white-led organization shows up in this work, this one is for you.

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🔗 Stay Connected

Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling

Let's connect on LinkedIn

Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com

In 2019, Ethiopia's Federal Ministry of Health was doing something nobody else had done. They were building the first national Compassionate and Respectful Care initiative woven into a federal health transformation plan. And they were building it by listening.

In this episode, I sit down with three of my former colleagues from the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program to talk about our work in Ethiopia, interviewing patients, providers, community health workers, ministry officials, NGO leaders, and professional associations across Addis Ababa, Oromia, and Amhara.

We talk about what we heard. That you cannot ask providers to be compassionate if the system isn't compassionate to them. That trainings alone don't hold unless leadership and culture hold them up. That compassion is subjective, which means measuring it without reducing it to a checklist requires a different kind of rigor. That the Ministry's incubation centers worked because facilities were given room to prototype in their specific contexts.

We also talk about what stayed with us and the impact of watching a federal body build strategy from the ground up.

This conversation is years overdue, and I'm so glad we finally had it.

Guests: Yuki Davis and Matt Hughsam

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🔗 Stay Connected

Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling

Let's connect on LinkedIn

Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com