GOLD Speakers

Karen Laing, IBCLC, AMT

• Country: USA

Biography:

Karen Laing, IBCLC, AMT is a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher with a background in reproductive health care. As a practitioner over the last 25 years, Karen has cared for families as a trauma-informed perinatal educator, a Board-Certified Lactation Consultant, and as a midwife. As an organizational leader, she is the founder and CEO of Birthways where she has played a role in creating innovative maternal/child service models incorporating perinatal education, home-based doula care, lactation services and perinatal mental health programs. She and her team are currently working to build the Okkanti platform, a transformative application that tackles disparities by providing care coordination, digital health tools, health education and access to maternal health supports. As a teacher of mindfulness and caregiving, she has taught and mentored providers throughout her career and is the creator of the Compass of Mindful Caregiving, 6 Qualities of Embodied Mindfulness, and 40 – second Compassion Initiatives, toolkits such as the Cup of Kindness for family caregivers and a number of programs designed to improve the ways we take care of one another. She founded WisdomWay Institute in 2017 to better share the tools that support improved safety, respect and compassion in care relationships while preventing burnout. Karen believes that systemic change involves many facets, but that we can begin with our moment-to-moment interactions.