NACPM 2013 Election Results are In!
Congratulations to Illysa Foster of Austin, Texas, Jamie Eidsath of Ann Arbor, Michigan and Autumn Vergo of Peterborough, New Hampshire. Welcome to the NACPM Board of Directors!
Illysa, Jamie and Autumn will be joining the NACPM leadership team at our meeting this October in Portland, Oregon. We look forward to working with them and we thank them for their service.
This year’s election results revealed a tie between two nominees for the second-most votes. The NACPM leadership responded by expanding the board from 7 to 8 members and will induct all three of these exemplary candidates into the board.
Meet the New Board Members:
Illysa is co-author of Professional Ethics in Midwifery Practice, a practical guide to ethics for midwives, and lectures at local, state and national conferences on midwifery ethics. She is studying perinatal psychology while training to be a psychotherapist for childbearing women. Illysa wants to help midwives in her region understand NACPM’s role, engage them with their professional organization, and assist them in having a national voice. She wants to support NACPM in upholding ethical and educational standards in the profession that reflect midwives’ deep commitment to quality maternity care and to promote the CPM credential as the standard for maternity care.
Autumn is a birth center owner, a CNM student, adjunct faculty at Birthwise Midwifery School in Maine, and a member of a New England regional multi-hospital quality improvement organization’s Homebirth Taskforce. She believes that CPMs have a unique perspective on patient choice and family-centered care, and that this perspective should be shared with our colleagues in healthcare and policy development. She wants to ensure that community midwifery remains a rich and sustainable career path for young people and for experienced midwives. To Autumn, serving on the Board of the NACPM represents an incredible opportunity to promote the visibility, expertise, and sustainability of the CPM profession.
Jamie is a partner at New Moon Midwifery since 2011, and is eager to support NACPM’s mission to expand access to midwifery care through policy work. As a midwife from a state with no licensing yet for CPMs, she wants to help NACPM support state licensure movements and bring the benefits of NACPM’s national policy initiatives to currently unlicensed states. Jamie believes it is important to support CPMs in collaborating with other health care providers, and to support access to physiologic birth and the care of CPMs for all women, regardless of income, especially women insured by Medicaid. She wants to help increase student’s access to high quality educational opportunities, student loans and financial aid to help grow and diversify the profession.
Welcome, Illysa, Autumn and Jamie!
Suzy Myers, CPM President
Mary Lawlor, CPM Executive Director