MRT-TI alum Brenda Vieyra breaking barriers in Latina/x breastfeeding
October 14, 2024
Brenda Vieyra, IBCLC, is a graduate of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute’s Mary Rose Tully Training Initiative (MRT-TI) class of 2017-2018. Since her days as an undergraduate public health student at California State University, Northridge, she was interested in infant and maternal health. A course Brenda took in her last semester of college sparked her interest in lactation, and she moved from California to Chapel Hill to join MRT-TI, one of the only Pathway 2 programs in the United States at that time. Now living in California, Brenda serves as the Infant Feeding Liaison for BreastfeedLA, a nonprofit in Los Angeles with the goal of promoting and supporting breastfeeding through education, outreach, and advocacy.

Brenda Vieyra
At BreastfeedLA, Brenda plays a number of essential roles in the Los Angeles community. She and her team help to ensure that emergency preparedness for infant feeding is present in local government policies. A current project they are working on incorporates lactation support for parents who are incarcerated, where they can be part of a doula program that supports them from the prenatal to postpartum period. Through her role at BreastfeedLA, Brenda has the opportunity to engage in promoting, protecting, and supporting breastfeeding. “I can definitely see myself here for a while,” she said. “It allows me a lot of flexibility to get involved in the things that I enjoy.”
Brenda’s advocacy work led her to cofound the California Latinx Lactation Collective with a group of other breastfeeding professionals, and they work to eliminate breastfeeding barriers in the Latina/x community. She remains committed to promoting equity in the field of lactation and credits MRT-TI for preparing her to work with diverse populations. “People are probably tired of me bragging about the MRT-TI program over here, because I compare everything to my program. I’m like, well, [MRT-TI] did it this way. So why can’t we?” Brenda said.
– Hannah Larson
Housed within the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute, the Mary Rose Tully Training Institute (MRT-TI) is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs upon recommendation of the Lactation Education Accreditation and Approval Review Committee. In 2016, MRT-TI earned the distinction of becoming the first accredited Pathway 2 lactation consultant training program in the United States. The program is in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at UNC Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.
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