Business Birth Story: Karli Smith, Human Rights Activist
Dear birthworkers, are you serving women in a non-triggered, non-reactive way, regardless of the environment?
In Episode 28 of the Birthworker Podcast, I'm joined by Karli Smith, the birth doula and human rights activist who is sharing her insight and experience from serving women through one of the most aggressive COVID lockdowns in the world.
In this interview with Karli Smith, we chat about:
How there’s always something to advocate for…
The maiden energy in birthwork that will have you running in circles…
How to approach hospital policy change effectively…
… and a whole lot more!
Kyleigh Banks: Nice to meet you.
Karli Smith: You, too.
Kyleigh Banks: I've been following you for a while, so this is kind of fun.
Karli Smith: Have you?
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah.
Karli Smith: You too, like here and there. But with the bloody algorithm, sometimes things never pop up. Then I was like, "Oh my gosh, I've missed so much of her stuff," when you messaged me.
Kyleigh Banks: I know.
Karli Smith: I went back and I was like, "Oh yeah, here she is."
Kyleigh Banks: Isn't that funny?
Karli Smith: Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Even it happens with my favorite people that I love following, and I hear their account to see their shit, but because they post probably some words that are flagged for Instagram, they don't pop up.
Karli Smith: Exactly.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay. What I'm doing, these podcasts are actually going to come out next week, so super fast turnaround, exciting. I'm interviewing a couple of other people who work with birthworkers in some capacity just to kind of share that a lot of new doulas have this thing in their head that it's like, it's always a competition with the other doulas. I almost want to show them just like I'm walking the walk and not just talking the talk.
Karli Smith: Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: I'm not scared to come and ask people how they help doulas and what they do. I'd really love to hear like... Nicole Joy told me... She explained it this way, but "It's like a business birth story." Instead of sharing your birth story, sharing your business birth story.
Karli Smith: Yeah. Okay.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, how you even heard what a doula was, how you started serving moms, how you pivoted, and now also mentor doulas. Then at the end, what offers you have for moms and doulas and how people can work with you, and maybe who your favorite type of clients are.
Karli Smith: Yeah. Cool. Easy. Sounds good.
Kyleigh Banks: You can start wherever you want to start.
Karli Smith: Just jump in?
Kyleigh Banks: I'm really curious, when did you hear the word doula for the first time? Or when did you really start in birthwork?
Karli Smith: Oh gosh. I'm one of those doulas who did not hear about doulas until after she had her own babies.
Kyleigh Banks: Amazing.
Karli Smith: I remember the day, actually. I was in a cafe with a girlfriend who I had actually met on Instagram, locally. She pointed out this other woman that had walked in who had a presence about her, let's say. You'll know who I'm talking about when I say her name. She was like, "Oh, look, that's Angela Gallow." I don't know if you know Angela Gallow.
Kyleigh Banks: I do.
Karli Smith: Yeah. I was like, "Who the fuck is Angela Gallow?" She's like, "She's a doula. She's famous on Instagram.” I was like, “What the hell is a doula?” Then she told me about it. From then on, then I started following Ang. Yeah, that was my birth by fire, if you like, into what a doula was. This was after I'd had my second baby, just after, I think. We were there with our young children. That's how I was introduced to the world of doulas through my friend from Instagram who showed me who Angela Gallow was.
Kyleigh Banks: I love that. Can I just say, there are so many doulas who are like, "There's not enough clients, there's not enough people giving birth." Then I think to myself that there are literally people giving birth right now who don't even know what a doula is yet.
Karli Smith: Exactly.
Kyleigh Banks: The room that we have to expand this community of birth work, it's insane.
Karli Smith: Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah, it's huge. From there, so my son would've been a newborn, because my career to that point was completely different. I'd spent 10 years in the humanitarian aid industry, so I was an aid worker doing a lot of travel and policy work and so forth. My background's in human rights law, and I was on maternity leave and was thinking about what it would look like to go back to work with two children to that type of job. I just had opened myself up mentally and emotionally to what a total career change might look like.
When you just plant that thought in your head and you don't even tell anyone, and then the universe goes, "Ding, ding, ding, ding." I had opened myself up to a new possibility and heard rumors of a restructure at my organization. Sure enough, I got a phone call one day saying, "Can you come in for a meeting?" I was like, "Yes." I went in and I saw the white envelope on the table and I was like, "That better be a redundancy package so that I can go and become a doula." It was, and literally the following day I signed up for Angela's doula training that she was doing in my city. We lived in the same city at the time, and the rest is history, as they say.
From there, I did her training, which was a week-long intensive in person, then I also had an online component. One week before my son turned one is when I attended my first birth. He was seven months at the training. He was the only baby there. Yeah, it just happened. It just unfolded. I didn't even really make much of a decision at all. Just, yeah, that was the birth.
Kyleigh Banks: From the very first entrance to birth work, did you already say, "Wow, I want to bring my background in advocacy and legal work into work?"
Karli Smith: Yeah, I did. Because once you have your own birth and people start telling you theirs, and I was like, "What the fuck is going on here? What's happening to women and people birthing here is illegal. Some of this stuff is illegal. What is going on? Why is no one saying no? Why is no one having conversations? Why is no one aware of what they can and can't do? What's going on? Why are so many people in my circles having these really challenging births in hospitals?"
Yeah, I knew right away, and that's why I was also attracted to Angela Gallow, because she did a lot of work in activism in the birth space. I looked at 10 other trainings and was like "Eh, too vanilla, too vanilla too... No, that's very pasty. I need something with fire in it. Something that's actually going to make a difference, not just handholding and that sort of thing." Straight away, Ang was up that alley. Yeah, I knew right away that the two would come together really nicely, and they have, which has been really great. I don't think I could have survived in this work if I didn't have that aspect of activism. Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. I feel like doula burnout comes in many different forms. I actually think for the majority of doulas, they don't even find their first clients. They burn out. But then there are other people who do find clients, and the burnout comes more in the form of witnessing trauma over, and over and over again, which are two very completely different problems, but both very prevalent in birthwork.
Karli Smith: Yes. Yeah, for sure.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Did you start off by doing the typical doula stuff or attending births in person, at home, at the hospital, all of that?
Karli Smith: Yeah. Most of my first births were at the hospital, and my first few clients really was word of mouth. I had put a website up and started an Instagram, but my first three really were all word of mouth and just people being like, "Oh yeah, I know someone and da da da." They got in touch with me. But yes, mostly hospital. Then my very first home birth, I'm actually about to attend her second home birth in the next couple of months, which is exciting. I'm seeing her tomorrow. That was an incredible experience to have the comparison between the two and just to be blown away by what much more undisturbed birth is like. Then it highlighted even more so the problems that we have in facility-based childbirth. Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Tell me about the process of starting to incorporate that advocacy stuff. Because when you're starting out as a doula, sometimes you don't know what you don't know yet, and you got to witness some shit to realize, "Oh yeah, this needs to change." I'd love to hear how you started incorporating the advocacy.
Karli Smith: Right from the beginning, if you know me, which you have for a while, you will know that from the beginning I started saying some pretty outlandish shit. If you scroll right back to the early days of my Instagram, I've always from the beginning had a fire in my belly, even as a young child about different things. My parents cut down a tree in the front yard when I was like, what would I be 14 or something? I lost it. "That's a tree. It's a living thing." I've always had that, and it was just always going to come out. I think if it's in you, it's just going to be in you and it's going to come out. You don't have to wait for an opportunity. There's always something to advocate on.
But it really became even more so during... I don't know if you're familiar much... I live in Melbourne, in Australia, but we had the harshest lockdowns in the world during Covid. We had 200 and something days of stage four lockdown, which was not at all leaving your house. It was the worst in the world. During that time, there were a lot of restrictions on people birthing in hospitals. That was really when... This is what, two and a half years ago now, and I've been a doula for like four years, so a year and a bit in, lockdowns hit. I started doing a lot of work trying to get people into hospitals. That was one-on-one with my own clients applying for exemptions and all that kind of thing. But it was also, so many people would contact me online and be like, "I'm having a cesarean and they won't let my partner in. What can I do?"
All this, fielding all these issues. Toward the end of the lockdowns, what was still happening was if you were having birth, and whether that was an instrumental birth or a surgical birth, you were on your own, and that's not right. The whole time, I was following the WHO recommendations and what different human rights bodies were saying about what was going on. In Australia, we have a couple of bodies that were providing some advice. I was following all of that with what was developing and evolving over time and what was happening wasn't right. What was happening in our city was not in alignment with what was being recommended. I tried as much as I could to bring that in. It's one thing just to be like, "I know this isn't right," but why? You have to go that extra mile and be like, "What is there, I know in my gut this is wrong. I know in my mind this is wrong, but what else is there that says this is wrong?"
That's not just me going to be jumping up and down going, "This isn't right." That's where the law comes in and where different recommendations from other bodies come in. I tried to gather as much of that information as I could to back up my case every single time, and it worked. Our local hospital ended up changing their policy literally overnight because I was on the phone with the CEO at eight o'clock on a Saturday night trying to get in to see a client. I was just emailing, emailing, "You need to let me in. She's in distress," and eventually they did.
The following day, the policy changed. The midwives who I'm friends with, they were like, "It changed literally after you did that thing." We know that having that kind of conversation with the right decision makers and not just blurting it out on Instagram, because CEOs of hospitals do not follow you on Instagram, unfortunate news.
Kyleigh Banks: Unfortunately.
Karli Smith: You have to go to the decision-makers. Once you get that, that's where change can happen, as well. Yeah, it's always been part of my work, that activism. Then, obviously, there's the one-on-one aspect with clients, but there is joining local advocacy groups, and national advocacy groups doing work for consumers and people interacting with the system.
Kyleigh Banks: How can you make this a sustainable job if a lot of the activism is actually happening just through your own greater will, just through your humanity and being a good human? A lot of times, you're not technically getting paid for that advocacy work you're doing. How is that sustainable for somebody?
Karli Smith: Yeah. I think there are a couple of aspects. Yeah. I have to remember, we all have to remember that it's a long game. It's like a long play. When you first come into it and you're all fired up and every single birth pisses you off, I mean aspects of how a person is treated, not like the birth in general. You're probably in the wrong job if you're being pissed off by a birth. But it's really easy in the beginning to feel like you're hitting your head against a brick wall and to have that rage inside of you, that's going nowhere. I think that's what can lead to burnout, as well. Remember that it is a long play. This change is not going to happen overnight. It could, but it's not going to. It's a generational change.
When you think about... I don't know if in America you're familiar with people like Rhea Dempsey and Jane Hardwick Collins, they talk a lot about what's happened in previous decades to get us to where we are now. What is the red thread of birth? When we look at all of that, significant change does happen over generations, but it is over generations. It's not in a day. It's not in a month, it's not in a year. It's generational change, and it involves cultural change, as well. It's not just about what's happening at a hospital, or with midwives privately, or anything like that. It's cultural change, as well. That systemic change tends to follow the cultural change. They have to go together.
Everything we're doing to address the issues in birthwork is multifaceted. I think remembering that helps it to be more sustainable. I think the second part is on more of an energetic level, dropping the maiden energy around it. The maiden energy around those issues is very hectic. It's very all over the place. It's high in rage. It's like... You know what I mean? It's really intense.
Kyleigh Banks: It's like what you said, you're just posting on Instagram mad at the world.
Karli Smith: Yeah, exactly.
Kyleigh Banks: That's maiden energy, it's not thought out. Yeah.
Karli Smith: I think when you embrace more of the mother energy, when you enter those phases, if you do have children and you don't even have to have children to enter those phases, that energy is very different. I think that's the energy that we need to bring to the change is more of that solid, grounded, inner knowing, deep knowing, interconnectedness. That's what will bring it forward, as well as all the actions that we do, the activity.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. I love that. How much do you feel that your past with advocacy and law was the reason that this hospital changed their policy? I'm asking because I feel like a new doula would hear your story and be like, "Oh, okay. Karli did it because she had that history. I don't have that, so how am I supposed to make a change?"
Karli Smith: Yeah. Well, they didn't know that I had that. It's not like they were like, "Oh, she sits on the board of this law organization or anything, so we better listen to what she's saying." It was more just the way that I framed everything. Again, it was that non maiden energy of how I approached it. Yes, I was persistent, but I was very tactical in my words. I was diplomatic. I wasn't calling them out in a way that they would just put a wall up. You have to be political about it, as much as it sucks in some ways.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, you got to play the game.
Karli Smith: Yeah, you have to play the game. When you approach it that way, I don't think it matters what your background is, as long as you come at it from that grounded place with the right information that you know for sure is true and applies, then it doesn't matter. You could've never had a job in your whole life and come to it from that, and they would never know. It doesn't matter.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. I say the same thing when I help doulas support women in the birth room and in maybe a tense situation in a hospital birth, the exact same thing. Can the doula remain non-triggered? Can the doulas not bring that reaction and that baggage? Because when a doula's triggered, that's when a lot of times the provider puts up that wall and says, "I'm not listening to you, or get out," sometimes, even. Yeah, the one with the calm mind tends to have a lot more of the power in that room.
Karli Smith: For sure, yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Are you doing work with doulas now to help them advocate for their clients?
Karli Smith: I am. Yeah, I guess also came out of the last year with people coming to me for different advice around all of what we just talked about. This time a year ago, I started sort of doing a series of masterclasses on different topics, for example, human rights and childbirth, and doing particular things with clients at different times in the journey, and this sort of thing. That series, I guess, rolled into what I ended up creating, which was the hospital birth course late last year, which I released in November, at the time of Black Friday sales, which was terrible timing. Anyway, so that's a whole other story.
But yeah, I am working with doulas. That particular course can be accessed by anybody and it's useful for everybody. But then just before that last year, I launched a mentorship called Power Mentorship for Birthworkers, which is in our fourth month of six, and I'll probably do it again at the end of this, another cohort, but which was really addressing like both business and birth for doulas and birthworkers. So it's really looking at power dynamics and addressing change in the system, but also about sustainable business and debriefing births and all that. So that's when I more heavily started working with other doulas and birth workers in more of a mentorship capacity rather than just kind of advice here and there and collaboration and that kind of thing, which had been happening for a long time. This was my first little formal entry into that world.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. And my journey sounds a lot like yours where I kept creating and people kept asking questions and I would just create based on what people wanted and eventually transitioned and this beautiful mentorship program came about. That's what really has been lacking as birth work has been going online, and maybe especially through covid, we're lacking that mentorship relationship, especially with our trainers. Like when I did my doula training program, Angela sounds amazing, but mine was two days in person, maybe three days, but the third day was, you know, just like chit chat, let's go get lunch together. So I made a comprehensive, full doula training program. It's six months with mentorship and pre-recorded videos.
I remember when I made it, I was like, oh, let me just make it like three months. And as I actually started making it, I'm like, three months isn't enough, It's not enough. Yeah. No. How is two days enough? How is three days enough? When three months is not enough, and even six months it's like, they get to the end of the program and they're like, wait a second, I wanna keep going. Because birthwork starts with life work, you know, it starts with that self-mastery and understanding your own triggers and biases and how you show up in the world. And then there's so much that goes on top of it, right? Like the birth theory and the practical stuff. Beyond that, of course, the business stuff. So I just love that you're combining all of that. You do self work, the trigger work, the advocacy, also birth debriefs and business. This is what we put in the birth community.
Karli Smith: Yeah. It's hard because so many trainings doulas come out of and think that they have everything they need, but they don't. I mean mine was much more comprehensive than others, but certainly even I came out and still was like, okay, I just need someone to hold my hand for a little while, because this is full on. I had a business mentor last year that ended up being 12 months, and even that was heartbreaking when we stopped, because I was like, I don't know if I can go on without you. I mean I can… but you know, it's still that feeling of like, is it ever enough? It needs to be.
Kyleigh Banks: There's a lot, there's a lot of benefit to just having someone to bounce ideas off of. Whether it's remodeling your home, giving birth, becoming a doula, like whatever it is. And not necessarily out of a place of needing validation from someone else. But just like bouncing your ideas off to make sure you're headed in the right direction.
Karli Smith: Well we work on our own, right? I remember in my previous jobs, I always had a team. I always had a manager and lots of people to bounce ideas around with, and we don't have that when we're working on our own. So really it's just employing a teammate I feel like, in a lot of ways.
Kyleigh Banks: 100%. Yeah. So, okay, tell us where to find you, and actually we didn't even introduce you at the beginning, so tell us who you are and where to find you, and how someone can reach out if they're interested in any of your programs.
Karli Smith: Yeah, thanks. So, hi, I'm Karli. I'm a birthworker based in Melbourne, Australia, just south of Melbourne. And you can find me on instagram @karlismith.doula, and then my website is www.carlysmith.com. Those are the two places you can find me. You can contact me on either place and I will see it. And right now I have the Hospital Birth Course going, which is for birthworkers. I'm happy to extend this offer to anyone listening, but is it is Australian based. So if you're in Australia and you're listening, then this is 100% for you. But if you are in America or another country, it is also very applicable to you. So have a look at it and see what you think. But the Hospital Birth Course is really designed for anyone who's birthing in a hospital to know exactly what they're up against and up for. It's a full rundown of everything.
I'm really proud of it and it's everything I talk about with my clients as well. It's like 6-8 hours worth of content plus other bits and pieces. So yeah, you can jump on there and have a look at at it. But for birthworkers, the offer is that when you purchase it, I will give you a code for your clients to purchase it at 50% off so you don't have to. There's a birthworker edition with an advocacy class and a whole range of stuff. But for the regular person birthing in a hospital, they can have it for a hundred dollars when you have that code. So it's very handy.
I give it to my clients all the time as a gift because I'm like, here's 6 hours of content we don't have to do. We can do way more fun things in person than talk about these things. So it's great. That's what I have going at the moment. And then at the end of this Power Mentorship round, I will probably do another cohort beginning in April. So if you want to learn more about that, you can, as they say, slide into the DMs and we can chat about it.
Kyleigh Banks: Amazing. So if you're reading this, go follow her on Instagram. Thank you so much. I actually have so many students from Australia and I feel like they're gonna just jump on that, especially the Hospital Birth Course. Thank you so much for giving us your time again.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.