Name: Community Talkback with Birth Sisters and Yolonda Coles Jones
Start: 2025-02-23T16:30:00-05:00
Location: Live Arts

Community Talkback with Birth Sisters and Yolonda Coles Jones

Live Arts presents a special community talkback with Doreen Bonnet and Lisa Brown of Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, along with Founder of The RESTORE Project and Empowered People Coaching & Consulting, Yolonda Coles Jones, on Sunday, February 23, following the 2pm performance. *You do not need to attend the show to attend the talkback*
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Yolonda Coles Jones, native and resident of Albemarle County, is the founder of The RESTORE Project and Empowered People Coaching & Consulting, devoted to fostering healing, connection, and empowerment. Through The RESTORE Project, Yolonda provides mindfulness-based programming to Black residents of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, regardless of age or gender, promoting emotional resilience and community well-being. With Empowered People, Yolonda partners with high-impact, visionary leaders to help them unapologetically embrace their authentic selves, prioritize self-care, and cultivate thriving, supportive spaces in their homes, workplaces, and communities. She has also been a home-based educating mother to 4 (at times 5) children for the past 17 years."
Birth Sisters of Charlottesville is a women of color community-based doula collective supporting women of color through their birth journey and into motherhood. Its aim is to amplify the resiliency of Black, Indigenous, Women of Color by drawing on life experiences, shared values, training, and sacred legacies to provide culturally rooted, trauma-intuitive perinatal services and advocacy. Birth Sisters serve women in the City of Charlottesville and the surrounding counties.
Lisa Brown (she/her) is a dedicated birth worker, community advocate, and lifelong learner. As the Co-Founder and Deputy Executive Director of Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, a Black woman-led community-based doula organization, she has spent the past six years providing perinatal support to women and birthing people in the Charlottesville area. Her passion for community service runs deep, influenced by her family's legacy of collective action and her belief in the power of community to create transformative change. Lisa’s approach to birth work centers on building trust, honoring traditions, and holding space for informed decision-making and self-empowerment. She is committed to improving maternal and reproductive health outcomes, fostering safe family support systems, and uplifting the sacred transitions of matrescence and parenthood.
Doreen Bonnet is Executive Director, Co-Founder, and doula with Birth Sisters of Charlottesville doula collective, an organization dedicated to dismantling root causes of systemic maternal health disparities for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. She has been providing perinatal support to women in the Charlottesville area for the last nine years. She is a certified Matrona Holistic Birth Doula, craniosacral therapist, a Pre and Perinatal Practitioner, a DONA birth doula, Birth in Color full spectrum doula, and a Sisters in Loss postpartum doula. She has a BA in Communications/Public Relations from University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is a graduate of the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts. It is my goal to support mothers in having births with the best possible outcomes for themselves and their babies. I honor the strength of a woman’s inherent capacity to bring forth life…in the way she chooses.