Perinatal Mental Health Training

March 18, 2026. Our annual trainings form the backbone of our efforts to build community capacity.

Join us for a multimodal training to deepen understanding of perinatal grief and loss, build practical, trauma-informed skills to support families and provider well being, and advance a shared community standard of compassionate care.

This training is free and open to clinical and non-clinical professionals working with families in the childbearing years in Whatcom County.

Keynote Speaker: Marquita Straus (she/they), MSW, LICSW, is a perinatal grief and trauma
therapist, death doula, and bereaved parent with over 15 years of experience supporting
families through pregnancy loss and birth trauma. She is the founder of Imani’s Light, a
nonprofit dedicated to supporting BIPOC families through perinatal grief and advancing
compassionate, trauma-informed care.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026 9am-4:30pm (registration begins at 8:30am)

PeaceHealth St. Luke's Community Education Center

3333 Squalicum Parkway, Bellingham, WA 98225

• Keynote: Perinatal Grief and Loss: Spectrum, Impact and Outcomes
• Lived Experiences of Loss
• Somatic Movement/Integration Practices
• Storytelling as a Healing Modality
• Best Practices in Supporting Families
• Providers' Experience of Loss and Practical Tools
• Systems, Policy and Community Responses

Through this training you will learn to:

• Understand the full spectrum of grief and loss in the perinatal period, its impact on individuals, family units, and communities, and how systemic inequities shape experiences and access. 
• Identify and strengthen skills in best practices for compassionate care to build strong therapeutic relationships when assessing, treating, and referring perinatal individuals experiencing grief and loss.
• Recognize the impacts of secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, and moral distress on providers.
• Develop grounding and emotional regulation practices, deepen supportive supervision strategies, and identify community support networks that uphold grief work.
• Connect individual practice to broader systems of care and to local and regional advocacy in developing a community standard of care for perinatal grief and loss.

Register here: https://perinatalsupport.org/event/whatcom_march2026/. This training has been developed in collaboration with Perinatal Support Washington and with grant funding from the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). CEUs pending for LICSWs, LMHCs, LMFTs and RNs.