What the foundation does
The Woven Womb Foundation operates three free community programs in Madison County: NurturHer, free monthly workshops where local providers teach nutrition, movement, and mental health; the Newborn Care Series, a monthly class on the first hundred days; and the Community Support Circle, a twice-monthly facilitated discussion for mothers navigating postpartum, fertility, or grief.
I run the programs myself, with the help of a small unpaid board of directors. The foundation has no paid staff at this writing. The cost of running the programs, room, materials, a printed handout for the Newborn Care Series, is covered by donors and small grants.
How the foundation differs from my private practice
Susan Naftzger's private practice, Woven Womb, is a private-pay maternal-health practice. The foundation is an independent 501(c)(3) public charity. I'm the founder of both, but the two operate separately. Private clients pay the practice; the foundation programs are free. None of the private-practice fee structure applies to the foundation, and none of the foundation donations underwrite private-practice work.
The reason the two exist at all is that they serve different needs. The private practice is for the families who can afford continuous personal care across pregnancy, birth, and the year after. The foundation is for the mothers in Madison County who deserve the same support and have nowhere to get it. Both are part of the same answer to the same question.
The story behind the founding
I came to maternal-health work through my own road of fertility, loss, and a redemptive home birth. The titles came later. I trained as a birth doula, then as a holistic health coach, then as a homeopathic practitioner. The longer I practiced, the more I noticed how much of what I did privately had no public-facing equivalent in this county. There's no community-care option for a postpartum mother in Anderson who can't afford a private practitioner. There's no free birth-prep class in Pendleton. There's no peer-support circle for fertility journeys in Madison County, period.
In 2026 I filed the paperwork. The foundation received 501(c)(3) status with EIN 41-3497163 in the same year. The first NurturHer session ran a few months later in a borrowed church basement. We now meet monthly in a rented community space. The Newborn Care Series has run two cohorts. The Community Support Circle has been meeting twice monthly for six months. None of this is large yet. It's, however, real and free.