Infant Feeding Support
We offer culturally sensitive and trauma-informed infant feeding support through our Nurture Together peer support programme.
Hosted online, this weekly support group is facilitated by trained Amma peer support volunteers, with oversight from an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC).
Support is available for those those who exclusively breastfeed, formula feed, pump, or combination feed. For more information, please contact Jenny Block at jenny@ammabirthcompanions.org.
Nurture Together: Background
In 2023/24, Amma Birth Companions and anthropologists from the University of Edinburgh partnered to create Nurture Together — a project that aimed to understand and fill the gaps in mainstream breastfeeding support, which often overlooks the needs of people with experiences of migration and those who are marginalised, or have experienced trauma. Together with a group of experts by experience, (former Amma service users), the Nurture Together team created culturally sensitive and trauma-informed breastfeeding resources and an online peer support group.
Project Design & Co-Production
The Nurture Together Team was comprised of:
- 10 mothers with lived experience of migration and the asylum system
- Amma Birth Companions
- Dr Lucy Lowe and Dr Anna Beesley (University of Edinburgh), who research the intersectional experiences of pregnancy, motherhood, and migration in Scotland
- A steering group of four breastfeeding experts, two mothers previously supported by Amma, and Amma staff members.
We facilitated 10 weekly 2.5 hour workshops that gave women the time and space to share their perceptions and experiences of birth and breastfeeding in their countries of origin and in the UK, and the ways in which their needs were and weren’t met by their partners, support networks, and healthcare providers. Lactation experts joined some of the sessions to discuss the physiology of breastfeeding, the myths that surround infant feeding, and introduce the basics of providing peer support. From there, the women proposed key messages for policy makers and practitioners, based on their lived experiences. We held an additional session with Engender to collaboratively produce our policy brief.
Project Outputs
A key output from the Nurture Together project was the creation of our online infant feeding peer support group. This group is facilitated weekly by trained Amma peer support volunteers who provide culturally sensitive and trauma-informed support.
We also created a series of informational videos for breastfeeding parents. These will soon be available in multiple languages via Amma’s YouTube channel.
