You hold the threshold. We’ll hold the business.
You trained to sit with the dying — not to run a marketing funnel, chase invoices, and work alone. Quality Death is becoming the place where families find you, and where the work finally pays like the calling it is.
The honest state of the work
The most needed role in dying is the least supported.
Most end-of-life doulas work alone in private practice, setting their own rates, with no employer, no benefits, and no coverage: Medicare and Medicaid pay nothing for end-of-life doulas. The field’s own advice is “treat it like a business.” You didn’t train for a business. You trained for a bedside.
The honest map of what can actually pay you → — including what the advance care planning codes really require, who is allowed to bill them, and the two arrangements to refuse if you are offered them.
Our answer: keep the bedside. Hand the business — the finding, the paying, the paperwork, the aloneness — to a cooperative built to carry it.
What is planned
Four things the co-op is building for doulas.
ClientsFamilies will find you here.
Quality Death is the family-facing front door for dying well. Families come here when they are ready for a person — and as the network forms, this is where they will find its doulas. The plan: you stop marketing, and the cooperative carries that work.
PaidHow pay will work.
Paid engagements are planned to run W-2 through the co-op once it begins care — payroll, taxes, and insurance handled, no invoicing. Some end-of-life care can also qualify for pre-tax dollars, case by case: ComfortCard explains which. The family’s plan administrator decides, often only where a physician documents medical necessity. Not everything qualifies — we’re honest about what does.
ToolsYour session kit, built.
CareGoals is the instrument for your work: five short sections that put a person’s values and wishes into their own words, and a values document they can share by link. You facilitate; the document stays on the family’s own device — and when they want it official, they copy it onto their state’s advance directive form. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, trained facilitators helped a whole town get there: about 96% of people who die there have an advance care plan. You can be that facilitator.
HeldNever the only one in the house.
Circle, not isolation. The co-op is being built so you have peer doulas, a care team behind you through the care grid, and a physician to turn to when a question needs one. The work is heavy. You shouldn’t carry it alone.
And you own it.
co-op.care’s design: once you are paid to give care, you become a worker-owner — patronage equity and a real vote. One owner, one vote. The value your presence creates stays with the people who create it. You cannot commoditize an owner.
Psilocybin, in Colorado
Where a doula fits — and the licensed path.
Colorado’s rules let a licensed facilitator hold a psilocybin session at home or in hospice for people in palliative or hospice care, among others. What you can do alongside a facilitator today, what only a facilitator may do, and the fastest lawful route to a license: the one-page guide →
Learn the craft here
A self-study course, and how doulas fit in a health system.
Fifteen modules from what an end-of-life doula is, through the vigil, family work, ethics and self-care, to how doulas work beside hospice, hospital, clinic and nursing-home teams. Each page is sourced and dated, and each has a short quiz. You can also practise the hard conversations out loud with invented people and see which of their needs your words met.
Open the doula training → How doulas fit in a health system →
This course is education, not a certification or licence, and it does not replace supervised practice. Progress and notes stay on your device.
Where the profession already lives
Train, or find a doula — the sources we trust.
We don’t run the directories, and our course is not a certification. These organizations already offer training, credentials and directories, and they’re good places to begin:
- NEDA — the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance, with a national Find a Doula directory.
- INELDA — the International End-of-Life Doula Association: training, certification, and a directory.
- Going With Grace — Alua Arthur’s death doula training, online and in person.
- Virtual Death Doula Network — remote doula care (vigil, companioning, respite, advance-directive planning, grief support), with live captioning on Zoom and a sliding scale.
These belong to their creators, not to us. We link because they’re good places to begin, not because of any referral arrangement.
Join the doula list
Be one of the first doulas in the network.
We’re gathering doulas now — INELDA- and NEDA-trained doulas especially welcome, and experienced uncertified doulas too. The doulas on this list help shape how the marketplace, the pay, and the governance work.