Honoring Our Founder: Charlene Chambers and the Healing Hearts Foundation Legacy.
Charlene Chambers
The story of how Pacific Perinatal Foundation was formed starts back in 2015, when Charlene Chambers founded the Healing Hearts Foundation, Vancouver Islands first and only charitable organisation dedicated to helping people through pregnancy and infant loss.
Charlene was inspired to create the Healing Hearts Foundation (HHF) after the loss of her own daughter, Faith Tien. As Founder and Executive Director, Charlene worked tirelessly to build a community and resources for countless grieving families on Vancouver Island, and was a champion for breaking the stigma surrounding pregnancy and infant loss. Her contributions to the loss community were innumerable.
Sadly, Charlene passed away unexpectedly in 2020. During the turbulent pandemic years that followed, a group of small but mighty dedicated volunteers kept the foundation afloat and continued peer support groups and advocacy work.
In 2022, the HHF team connected with the clinical team at Full Circle Perinatal Care. Through a shared vision of improved collaborative care and a deep passion for helping individuals who experience the pain of infertility, pregnancy loss, and infant loss, a new organisation was born: Pacific Perinatal Foundation.
Memory/comfort box
We truly believe that healing is found by being in community with one another and that we can work together to address the current gaps in our health systems to better support people who experience difficult fertility and pregnancy-related events.
As the Pacific Perinatal Foundation, we strategically integrate hospital and community-based services to provide seamless support through the clinical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual experience of pregnancy loss and reproductive trauma. The Foundation services have a broad reach that honors the original grass-roots efforts of HHF and incorporates community-based care and hospital-based care.
At the core of Pacific Perinatal Foundation’s services are collaborative and integrated community volunteers, midwives, perinatal care physicians, social workers, counsellors, acupuncturists and mindfulness instructors who work towards the common goal of helping heal reproductive trauma.