Female Disruptors: Kelly Cox and Celia Castleman of Share the Drop On The Three Things You Need To…

Female Disruptors: Kelly Cox and Celia Castleman of Share the Drop On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

“Thicken up’. We pitch this idea all the time; a lot of times to men who aren’t familiar with the practice of community milk sharing. We deal with questioning eyes, responses of ‘that sounds gross’, the list goes on and on. We have had to learn not to take any of this personally; we believe in our mission and when others don’t we just let that slide.

As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kelly Cox and Celia Castleman, Co-Founders of Share the Drop.

A registered prenatal yoga teacher and birth doula, Kelly has taught pre and perinatal yoga for 15 years. For a decade, she owned and operated the award-winning yoga studio, Bend: an essential institution in central Virginia that supported women through pregnancy, birth and parenthood. As a breast cancer survivor, Kelly has helped source human milk for other survivors. Supporting cancer survivors is one of her core motivations for founding The Drop.

A mother of three, Celia shared her excess milk supply with families who couldn’t produce enough milk for their infants. For the last eight years, she has collaborated with change makers, innovators and social entrepreneurs and served as Vice President of the Charlottesville National Organization for Women. From the insight and experience working with phenomenal leaders, Celia is ‘pumped’ to launch a start-up empowering women and families to inclusively care for one another.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

As a registered prenatal yoga teacher and birth doula, Kelly supported thousands of families through pregnancy, birth and parenthood. In her yoga studio, families connected over the trials and tribulations of pre/postpartum bodies, sleep training, partner relationships and of course, infant feeding. Taking note of her clients’ emotional wellbeing, Kelly realized that feeding newborns created a wave of stress, pressure and often led to postpartum depression. She held weekly free lactation support groups and regularly helped match local families with an excess supply of milk to families in need. And as a breast cancer survivor, she gave particular attention to fellow survivors sourcing milk for their infants.

One particular evening, Kelly was on her phone, scrolling through her contacts to source extra milk for a doula client when she received a text notification that she had “matched” with a prospective date. The idea for a mobile app to match human milk donors and recipients was born.

Pregnant with her third child and in a new town, Celia found a prenatal yoga studio for support as much as for the health benefits. She instantly clicked with her instructor, Kelly. Attending classes for the social aspect and kinship, Celia felt a strong sense of community and support. After the birth of her baby, Celia had an oversupply of milk and a freezer full of excess. She hopped on the internet and found a huge village (half a million members) of peer-to-peer milk donors and recipients.

While forming a sacred bond during pregnancy, birth and postpartum, Celia and Kelly set out to develop a solution to solve the disparities between infants with access to breast milk and those without.

Major medical authorities including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the World Health Organization recommend exclusively feeding human milk to infants for the first 6 months of life. And yet, in the United States, only 25% of babies are. That number hasn’t changed in over two decades. What has changed is a more challenging and difficult circumstance new parents are faced with: the necessity for both caregivers to return to work shortly after the baby has arrived, hormonal disorders, breast cancer, mental health issues, among many more.

We know that human milk is the gold standard for infant health and nutrition. We know that some lactating mothers produce more supply than just their own infant can consume. We know that wet nursing, first recorded in 3000 BCE, has sustained our civilization from the beginning. And yet, fraught with politics, even breastfeeding has been shamed and shunned. We also know that our world continues to change. We’ve lived through a Global Pandemic, droughts, wildfires, and other emergencies. Human milk has continued to sustain even the most vulnerable premature babies. We can’t think of a more crucial time for our take on a modern-day wet nursing revival.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We know that feeding infants has taken two paths in the U.S. for decades: breastfeeding or formula feeding. As more and more research has proven the benefits of breastfeeding, we are still in a position in which infant formula is the go-to for families. Enter 2022 and we have been dealing with contaminations in infant formula, followed by a shortage that left many families unable to find formula to feed their infants.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

After an exhaustive search, we finally found an app developer we were comfortable with. All ‘meetings’ were in the height of Covid so some days we found ourselves working out of one of our homes, in a coffee shop, etc. and we realized, like the rest of the world, we could work from anywhere. Kelly had a rough year with losses and major life changes and took off on a one-way ticket to Mexico. She never missed a meeting, tried to hide the palm trees behind her during Zoom calls, but distance was never an issue. One morning in the Fall of 2021, the entire development team was set to meet for the first time; we were excited and so eager. Kelly was on a small island at that time; got up early to walk out for coffee only to find the entire island was out of power; no way to connect to Zoom, no way to call or text to let Celia know what was happening. Seven hours later she was finally able to reach Celia to let her know she had in fact not been kidnapped, etc.

Needless to say, scheduling important team meetings while on a remote island is probably not the best idea.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

(Kelly) My mentors have always been the families I have worked with; I saw them struggle being able to feed their babies, return to work, maintain relationships when their world revolved around being parents. They are exactly why I started to think about ways to help.

We of course have a fantastic board of advisors who share our mission; two of them mothers who work full-time and have shared their struggles with feeding and donating their excess milk.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

Community milk sharing is not a new concept; it has been happening informally for years and Facebook has groups dedicated to this mission for the last decade. We have seen families attempt to share or receive on these antiquated systems and simply wanted to offer an immediate, in real time and in their neighborhoods solution.

You can go on a dating app and immediately meet someone to date, you can order an Uber and jump in a car with a stranger; we are offering the same option yet due to that nature of doing something that is a ‘new’ concept for most people, we continue to face rejection. Being rejected by Apple has only made us fight harder to get this to market and realize we can do this ourselves and do not have to cower to the power players.

Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

‘Stay the course’. We have struggled getting Apple to approve this mission; we just kept resubmitting and standing our ground. When we received their last rejection, we started building a web app. We will not soften our mission, we will simply just repivot.

“Thicken up’. We pitch this idea all the time; a lot of times to men who aren’t familiar with the practice of community milk sharing. We deal with questioning eyes, responses of ‘that sounds gross’, the list goes on and on. We have had to learn not to take any of this personally; we believe in our mission and when others don’t we just let that slide.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

After attempting to get approval from Apple we simply walked away and had to recreate an approach that will allow this to get to market. A web app can give as much functionality as a mobile app and at the end of the day makes us even more inclusive. We have received messages from families stating they do not have a smartphone, or computer and have to rely on public access (libraries, WIC offices, etc.). This allows us to serve even more families and we would not have gone down that road if we hadn’t been rejected by Apple.

We are quickly investing more time and money to get this to market as soon as possible.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?

We have to prove ourselves more; we have to make a lot more noise to be heard. We haven’t developed a simple new gadget that we can pump out to the masses. We are creating a new option for families that is tied to a lot of opinions. The act of constantly having to educate others on the history of community milk sharing has been exhausting.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

No one is focusing on the issue of how access to human milk affects so many. Not only is It difficult for many women to breastfeed, we have left so many people out in terms of options on how to feed their children. As a breast cancer survivor (Kelly), I have been committed to helping other survivors gain access to human milk. This application can also offer gay couples, adoptive parents, those who use a surrogate, family members who are raising infants to have access as well. We are very proud of this.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

‘It takes a village to raise the village’. We have devoted our careers to building community. Life is hard, we have both witnessed how much easier it is when we live in community and take care of each other. This knowledge has been at the heart of the work we are doing.

How can our readers follow you online?

Go to our website, www.sharethedrop.com; enter email address to sign up for our newsletter updates
Follow us on social media: Instagram @sharethedrop

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShareTheDrop/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sharethedrop

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sharethedrop/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Female Disruptors: Kelly Cox and Celia Castleman of Share the Drop On The Three Things You Need To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

October 17, 2022