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Administrative Director
 Sharon K. Evans, CPM brings over 25 years of experience in midwifery and healing, with over a decade focused on training midwives, including regulatory and administrative functions.
She served on the Board of Directors of the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM) from 1999 to 2004. She was first hired to manage the Applications Department for NARM in 1997 and was later appointed Director of Applications for NARM in 1999. She served on the State of Alaska Board of Certified Direct-Entry Midwives from 2001-2005, and as the President of Oregon Midwifery Council, 1996-1998, the Chair of the NARM Qualified Evaluator Committee, 1995-1997, and President of Midwives Association of Alaska, 1992-1993.
She was owner of Valley Natural Health Center, School of Massage Therapy, authorized by the State of Alaska Post-Secondary Education, 1985-1988.
She is now retired from clinical practice but brings with her years of experience delivering babies outside of the hospital, being a preceptor, and training midwives. In addition to her midwifery skills, she is a practitioner of the Natural Healing Arts and has worked in private practice as a massage therapist and as a teacher of various massage and natural healing techniques since 1985.
She completed the Center for American Birth Centers (CABC) accreditation process for Mat-Su Midwifery Birth Center in Wasilla, Alaska, and continues to work there one day a week as Quality Assurance Analyst.
She is the co-author of Practical Skills Guide for Midwifery (2004), Starting an I. V. and Other Invasive Skills for the Birth Setting (2007), and the DVD The Basic Training for I.V. Therapy & Hypovolemic Shock Treatment (2007), Morningstar Publishing Company.
She currently resides in Palmer, Alaska with her husband of 37 years and is the mother of seven grown children and 20 grandchildren, many of whom were born into her hands.
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Academic Director
 Daphne Singingtree, CPM began her path in midwifery in 1974 and had an active home and birth center practice until her retirement in 2002. She started teaching in 1979, and her life's work has been midwifery education.
She was a founding member of the Midwifery Educators Coalition, the forerunner of Midwifery Education and Accreditation Council (MEAC), and served on the MEAC Board of Directors 1997-2001. She was the Vice Chair of the Oregon State Board of Direct Entry Midwifery, 1999-2001, and served as the Education Committee Chair for the Midwives Alliance of North America. A founding member of the Oregon Midwifery Council, Daphne was the Public Relations Chair from 1982 to 1989. She is currently a board member of the Tribal Healing Council, a non-profit organization devoted to preserving healing and natural medicine among native people.
She was the founder and director of the Birthsong School of Midwifery from 1979 to 1989 and of the Oregon School of Midwifery (OSM) from 1993 to 2002.
In 1998, she became committed to the distance education model, opening a distance learning program for OSM students, which included students from all over the world. When the school closed in 2002, she turned over the program she created to another school and took a hiatus from midwifery, becoming a distance student herself. She is a student at Ashford University were she is completing her Bachelor's in Organizational Management, and working towards a Master's Degree in Education with a concentration on Learning with Technology.
She is the author of the Birthsong Midwifery Workbook, the Emergency Guide to Obstetric Complications, and Training Midwives: A Guide for Preceptors, as well as many other publications and resources for midwifery educators. She also is a web designer and designed this site and many others.
She is the mother of four grown children and has two grandchildren, both of whom she helped deliver at home. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
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Business Director
.jpg) Melissa Kelly has been a bookkeeper for close to ten years and was the Business Director for a small non-profit elementary school for the past five, before deciding to work from home with her children. As doula and soon a childbirth educator, she is happy to use her business knowledge to the field of birth and health. She is currently working towards finishing her business degree through her local community college.
She’s happily married to a wonderfully supportive husband and mother to four beautiful girls ages 10, 4, 2 and 5 months, all of whom were born with the assistance of midwives, the youngest three at home. She lives in Tillamook, Oregon. |
Information Technology Director
 Joe Cheng has over ten years experience supporting instructional and administrative technology in the non-profit, adult education, secondary and higher ed arenas. He also has seven years experience teaching in those same areas, and has spent a couple years managing facilities and operations at two emergency shelters.
He has a B.A. in Math and Philosophy from Yale University and spent three years in graduate school at CSU Long Beach researching feminist globalization theory, feminist jurisprudence and formal semantics. Last year he completed coursework in preparation for the Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification exams.
Joe lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and their two amazing babies, both born through midwifery and magic, and both exactly two weeks and five days "past due".
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Registrar
 Emily Levang is from Duluth, Minnesota, where she went to the College of Saint Scholastica for Economics and Spanish. Since graduation she has been living in Boulder, Colorado, working in the field of human development and wellness. Now she and her fiancé Ryan have returned to Duluth for their love of lakes, trees, and Minnesotans.
Emily is training to become a certified Integral Life Coach from Integral Coaching Canada, and works with women in the areas of their lives that are deeply important to them. She is also continuing her education in subjects she is passionate about with classes such as Women and Religion, Vocation and Money, and Creative Writing. She loves to practice yoga, spend time in nature, write, and learn. |
Course Development Director
 Kim Perry, CPM, CNM has been involved in home birth since 1983 and was drawn to midwifery because of her own birth experiences. She became an apprentice trained midwife in 1991, a CPM in 1996, and a CNM in 2003.
She has taught in two Associate Degree Nursing programs since 2005 and has precepted apprentices through the CPM certification process. She has been an advocate of midwifery licensure in the State of Illinois for over 20 years, co-founded Illinois Families For Midwifery, and is a Board member of the Coalition For Illinois Midwifery.
Kim has an extensive background as a distance learner, having graduated from Excelsior College’s nontraditional Associate Degree nursing program, followed by an online BSN program from Husson College in Bangor, Maine, and finally a distance learning Master’s degree program in New York. Kim holds a Master’s degree in Nursing (Nurse Midwifery) from the State University of New York at Stony Brook .
She is the mother of eight children, the last six born at home. She lives with her husband and family in Osco, IL
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IT Team
Programmer Tech Support
 John Siefer was born and raised around computers. At the age of 7, when he expressed an interest in his father's computer, his father told him that he could not play on it until he could program it, so he set out to learn BASIC in a few short weeks. Since then, he has always been on and around computers. He learned several different (occasionally obscure) programming languages during the course of his high school career, learning at the hands of one of the authors of the space shuttle software.
After high school, John joined the US Navy, where he worked as an engineer, supervising his own work area, all the while learning still other "dead" computer languages. After leaving the navy, he attended Oregon Polytechnical Institute to learn Computer Aided Drafting and Design. It was here that he started learning the more modern programming languages.
After school, John began designing basic HTML webpages as a side job while repairing computers. He learned PHP and MySQL, using a Linux environment, and has been developing pages since then, for over 12 years now.
John lives on the Oregon coast with his beautiful wife and two wonderful boys (the first born with a midwife) |
IT Team
LMS Specialist
 E. L. Cooper is an Learning Management Software (LMS) specialist who has a long professional history working with distance learning delivery as well as providing open source training for professors and administrators. "I was a distance learner in the 70's when that meant assignments in the mail. A cassette tape was cutting edge technology at the time. I am an independent learner and researcher so that worked well for me. It has been proven that most people require some degree of synchronous for a successful learning experience. Today teachers can teach in real time literally across oceans and thanks to on line learning prove that students are meeting all of any industries classroom requirements. I can monitor a test with video conferencing or send you to the largest/smallest library in the world with the click of a mouse. This is probably the most exciting time in education's history since the completion of the library at Alexander. "
She lives in Ohio with her four dogs. |
Disability Services Coordinator
 Jenifer Holloman, MA was born and raised on Cape Cod, a 77 mile stretch of land comprised of quaint villages and towns surrounded by ocean. At age 25, she moved to the Boston area to finish her college education. She attended Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she received a B.S in secondary education, and went on to Bridgewater State College, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts to earn a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership. During the last ten years she taught various courses and grade levels for the Boston Public Schools. She continued her education by attending Andover- Newton Theological School in Newton and Harvard Divinity School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she furthered her education taking courses to help inform her work with women and young people. In 2005, she was drawn to the idea that raising goats, organic farming, and being a birth doula would be the right way of life. She has been happily paying the price ever since. She shares this life with her wonderful and patient carpenter and farmer husband and fantastic twenty year old daughter who is studying at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is expecting a baby in January.
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 Terresa Grace was born in Seattle, Washington but later on in life she settled in Davis, California. She has been apprenticing at homebirths since 2000 and was a regional representative for the California Association of Midwives from 2000-2001. Terresa has an AA in Social Sciences, and a certificate in Medical Assisting. She is now attending Aviva Institute to finish her lifelong pursuit in Midwifery.
Terresa is mother to five wonderful children, Eric 20, Kevin 18, Ashlyne 17, Christian 11 and Cameron 9 and married to a very supportive husband. |
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