Susan Arthur helps people birth new projects, new businesses and new babies. As a health educator, professional doula and yoga instructor, she feels fortunate and blessed to educate people across their lifespans, offering any help that she can in making them healthier and happier in pursuing their life’s true potential. She is passionate about ending health disparities and building resilient and healthy communities.
A certified Integral Yoga instructor, Susan has been teaching yoga since 1995 in settings ranging from gyms and studios to downtown conference rooms and the elementary school at Yosemite National Park. She specializes in prenatal and postnatal (parent & baby) yoga and loves leading yoga hikes around the staircases and hills of San Francisco.
A long-time Mission resident, Susan is a Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator (LCCE) who taught childbirth preparation classes for many years at CPMC/St. Luke’s Hospital in both Spanish and English. She also offers customized workshops for expectant families in their homes.
A DONA International trained birth doula and a Natural Resources trained postpartum doula, Susan accompanies San Francisco women and families in labor and birth and at home during the postpartum period to help them transition into parenthood. Susan has helped train and mentor new birth and postpartum doulas for the volunteer doula programs at San Francisco General Hospital and the Homeless Prenatal Program.
Susan encourages her clients to trust the innate intelligence of their bodies, offering evidenced-based information to help them make informed health care decisions during pregnancy, in childbirth, when parenting their children, themselves and their own parents.
Most recently, Susan coordinated the Healthy Apple Award pilot program to improve healthy eating and physical activity among pre-school age children in child care settings for the Children’s Council of San Francisco.
Susan earned a Master of Public Health degree from San Francisco State University where her culminating experience addressed curriculum development for training doulas to serve pregnant women living with HIV. She presented her research via poster at Lamaze International’s 2013 conference in New Orleans. Susan also served as a Maternal and Child Health Student Fellow with the American Public Health Association.
Her professional background includes working as a development associate, grant writer and volunteer coordinator at the Homeless Prenatal Program and running her own public relations business for nearly a decade. Susan also managed public relations at Yosemite National Park and served as community and media relations manager at the San Francisco Chronicle. She has a BS in journalism and a BA in Spanish from Ohio University.
Susan is a member of Natural Resources and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. She speaks Spanish, rides her bicycle (except on Take Your Bike to Work Day when her bike was stolen), enjoys water fitness and Tai Chi Chih classes. She loves to travel and take yoga classes in foreign countries, including India, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Nicaragua. In 2009, Susan served in Nicaragua as a Kiva Fellow and wrote a blog post on breastfeeding and microfinance for World Breastfeeding Week. Read her other Kiva blog posts, including her “As the Microfinance Mundo Turns” series here.