Photo by Deb Gau Jenna Erickson said hello to Isabella Johnson and four-month-old Elsie Johnson during an open house at the Nurturey in Marshall on Saturday. Erickson said the Nurturey will bring together different birth and parenting resources in one location on Main Street.

MARSHALL — There’s a lot to think about when having and caring for a new baby, and it can be helpful just to have someone there for support, Jenna Erickson and Jess Dressen said. Together with midwife Eileen Carlson, Erickson and Dressen are working to offer a wide range of education and support services for parents, all in one place.

“We’re really hoping, at the end of the day, that it’s really like a community for parents,” Erickson said.

Over the weekend, Erickson and Dressen held an open house to welcome area residents to the Nurturey, a new “parenting studio” located at 348 West Main Street in Marshall. The studio includes shared gathering space, retail space for items like breast pump parts, and offices for doula and lactation support services and Tree of Life Midwifery.

“We want to help parents to have a better experience,” Dressen said.

Both Erickson and Dressen have backgrounds in nursing, and were interested in helping parents during and after childbirth, and with feeding infants. While bigger cities often have groups like La Leche League that focus on education about breastfeeding, there aren’t as many resources available in rural areas, Erickson and Dressen said.

Erickson completed training to become a certified lactation consultant in 2019, and founded Southwest Minnesota Lactation and Beyond to help mothers with feeding their new babies. Dressen leads a lactation support group, and both she and Erickson have also gone through doula training. Doulas help give parents evidence-based information and provide emotional and physical support during and after childbirth, Dressen said.

They also connected with Eileen Carlson, a certified professional midwife (CPM) with a practice based in Marshall. She said her path to becoming a midwife included two years of study in at an international school in the Philippines, as well as certification. Carlson is licensed as a CPM for home births in both Minnesota and South Dakota, and works in an area with about a 60-mile radius from Marshall.

Carlson said working with a midwife offers pregnant parents continuity of care because they’re working with the same person all the way through the birthing process.

“Just having support at a birth is huge,” Carlson said.

Some parents also feel more comfortable when they can give birth at home, in familiar surroundings, she said.

Carlson said she works only with low-risk pregnancies, and works with parents to help make sure they give birth safely.

“There are standards of care I’ve been given by Minnesota,” she said. She also makes emergency plans together with parents. “We always talk about, where’s our backup hospital?”

With so many different support services available from midwifery to lactation support, Erickson and Dressen said they knew they needed a way to bring them all together in the Marshall area. Over the past year, they began looking for a shared space for offices and classes.

“We all do different jobs, but in the end it came together,” with the location on Main Street, Dressen said.

Erickson said the Nurturey doesn’t just have office space for lactation, doula and midwife services. It will be a place where childbirth and infant feeding classes and breastfeeding support group meetings can be held. Erickson said they plan to have weekly drop-in feeding clinics as well.

“That’s been something that’s kind of a dream of ours,” she said.

There’s also a small retail store area for items like pregnancy support products, nursing supplies and breast pump parts.

“We do pump flange fittings as well,” Dressen said.

On Saturday, Dressen and Erickson were excited to have area residents come visit the Nurturey.

“It’s been a vision of both of ours since we met,” Dressen said.

More information on the Nuturey and the services offered there can be found online at www.thenurturey.com.