Meet The Wayfinders

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Meet the Wayfinders is an oral history collection of empowering, personal stories featuring video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them! The series was created at the invitation of La Leche League International in celebration of their 65th Anniversary Conference held October 15-18, 2021. While the series was presented live in October 2021, conference attendees viewed the collection on LLLI’s website through April 2022. 

This website presents the series to the public for the first time in celebration of:

World Breastfeeding Week, August 1-7

National Breastfeeding Month, August 1 - 31

Indigenous Milk Medicine Week, August 8 - 14

Black Breastfeeding Week, August 25 - 31

The Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series includes an overview video, where participants learn the five hallmarks of wayfinder advocacy, as well as view highlights of the nine interviews. Attendees will also receive a resource guide in PDF form to help find the many references discussed in the collection.  The conference link to the collection also includes the nine full interviews, ranging in 15-30 minutes each. 

In Meet the Wayfinders, conference participants will discover reasons why cultural change is difficult and how the breastfeeding advocates featured in this oral history collection were successful in breaking, transforming, and maneuvering around barriers in:

• The formula company “captured” biomedical field and colonization of populations worldwide: Cecilia Tomori, PhD, Director of Global Health and Community Health, Johns Hopkins University
• The siloed-science of academia and research which doesn’t (can’t) support a whole child wellness model: Darcia Narvaez, PhD, Professor of Psychology Emerita, University of Notre Dame; Founder, The Evolved Nest
• Hospital and medical professional culture’s systemic racism, Kimarie Bugg, DNP, FNP-BC, MPH, FAAN, IBCLC, Founder, Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere
• African-American and Indigenous peoples’ colonization created anti-breastfeeding bias, Kimarie Bugg, DNP, Founder, Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere; Wesley Bugg, JD, Reaching Our Brothers Everywhere; and Jasha Lyons Echo-Hawk, Indigenous Milk Medicine Week and Indigenous Milk Medicine Collective, Co-Founder
• Mainstream media cultural bias, Jamie Grumet, TIME cover breastfeeding mother from May 2012
• Workplace and gender equity laws, Joan C. Williams, JD, Founder, Center for Worklife Law, University of California at Hastings
• Inclusion of fathers in breastfeeding and birth advocacy, Wesley Bugg, JD, Reaching Our Brothers Everywhere
• Creating support for families, Patty Kornwolf, RN-C, Kindred World Founding Director
• Performance Arts, using arts for internal and external barrier-breaking, Cathleen O’Malley, playwright, MilkDrunk

In this series, the viewer will discover the hallmarks of successful barrier-breaking shared by the wayfinders who answer three questions:

• When were they first exposed to breastfeeding? 
• Were they surprised to discover barriers to breastfeeding, particularly in their field? 
• And how have they overcome, transformed, or moved beyond these barriers?

Through their personal histories, the wayfinders reveal to us a holistic form of breastfeeding advocacy, a strategy that does not wait for external, cultural forces to change and support individual and collective wellness. 

All of our presenters address the opportunities awaiting us in our post-pandemic world and how, with an understanding of the hallmarks of successful barrier-breaking, we too, can answer the call to become a wayfinder, to introduce and integrate a new way forward right where we stand as individuals, and to joyfully gather to build a breastfeeding-friendly culture.