Stephanie Wellwood took on the role of CEO of two pregnancy centers in Michigan earlier this year. After visiting the 53rd annual Heartbeat International Conference In April she returned home with new insights and ideas.
The conference took place in Salt Lake City from April 24 to 26, 2024.
“The biggest WOW moment for me as a new director was artificial intelligence and how we can use it for good,” Wellwood said. “For me, that was new and kind of scary. But participating in the breakout session that I went to was challenging and I wanted to go back and learn more about artificial intelligence and how we can use it in our center, whether it’s with donors or to see how we can reach (pregnant women) more effectively.”
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Newsletters, thank you letters and social media marketing are some aspects into which AI can be integrated, she added.
“We need to think carefully about where we publish our content,” she said. “Who is our target audience and are we really reaching them?”
Wellwood said she and her team, including a recently hired marketing coordinator, use social media to reach the Generation Z target audience, and they also use in-person outreach through local events. Alpha Care Center operates medical care centers in Lowell, Michigan, and another in Lake Odessa. The centers are about 25 miles apart. The Lake Odessa clinic is in a smaller, rural area, she said, and so county fairs and community events such as county expos and community resource fairs reach a lot of people, including the age group Alpha wants to see. Parades with floats and “lots of candy” are other ways to make the two communities aware of the PRCs, Wellwood said.
“We get our volunteers and pack lots of Smarties® (with a poem about life),” she said.
Another result of the conference was more personal.
“I have to protect my personal time. A lot of the meetings I’ve been in have been on the way to the new principal. It’s so easy to get carried away and so you really have to protect your time with your family,” Wellwood said.
The step into the leadership role
She began her ministry with pro-life pregnancy work at the Lake Odessa location. Wellwood started as a volunteer advocate and moved into a leadership position a few years later. Last year, when Alpha’s former executive director for the two locations decided to leave after 10 years, Wellwood was encouraged to take the vacant position. Due to a relatively recent marriage, a career that offered health insurance and other reasons, she declined. Her church offered to consider her as a missionary, and a parishioner offered to pay for her health insurance if she took the job. She began her new role in January of this year.
She still works frequently as a lawyer.
“I don’t ask my employees to do anything I wouldn’t do,” Wellwood said.
In many ways, she understands the fears and concerns of women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. Wellwood was a single mother. Her former husband left her and her children when they were still toddlers. Her children are now grown and Wellwood has remarried in recent years. Her husband, Brian, is very supportive of his wife in her new job in the nonprofit sector and attended the Heartbeat Conference with her this year.
Center history
Alpha Care Center began operations as part of a larger organization, a group of pregnancy care centers known as Alpha Women’s Center of West Michigan. In the mid-2000s, Lowell became a standalone facility, Wellwood said, and in 2016 the organization was renamed Alpha Family Center of Lowell to be more open to men as well.
“We offered a GED program that was open to both men and women,” Wellwood said.
The Lowell Center, located about 15 miles east of Grand Rapids, also became a medical clinic in 2016.
Two years later, a church in Lake Odessa approached the Lowell Clinic administration and asked them to consider opening a branch in their community. Wellwood visited that church.
“As a church, we wanted to have a community in our own community,” she said. “We had looked at several pregnancy centers in our area and agreed that Alpha Family Center (was the best fit) – their beliefs aligned with ours – and we approached them about a partnership.”
In January 2019, the Board began to review this request and the second satellite center opened its doors the following January. But then the pandemic crisis presented an obstacle.
“But COVID hasn’t been able to get us down,” Wellwood said.
Virtual teaching became the predominant method of interacting with customers.
The Lake Odessa Clinic is located about 23 miles southeast of Lowell and is also a medical clinic.
In addition to pregnancy testing, Alpha’s nursing staff offers limited obstetric ultrasounds and STD testing. Support, encouragement and referrals are the most important offerings, Wellwood said.
Another rebranding took place in 2022.
“We decided to change our name from Alpha Family Center to Alpha Care Center,” she said. “We were told that the word ‘family’ and the logo associated with it was a turn-off for women considering abortion, and we wanted to try to focus on bringing those women considering abortion onto the team.”
In 2023, both clinics served more than 130 unique clients, and in the first quarter of this year, Alpha Care Center staff cared for more than 60, Wellwood said News about pregnancy support.
Pro-Life in a Pro-Abortion State
Michigan is an abortion state. Abortions are performed there during all nine months of pregnancy, as the state Protection removed for the unborn, given to them in a 1931 law. This historic law was declared unconstitutional by a Michigan court in September 2022. In the November election of this year, a proposal to establish a “state constitutional right to ‘reproductive freedom,’ including abortion, passed by a vote of 56.7 percent to 43.3 percent.” after according to a report by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI).
The same report shows that more than 30,000 abortions were reported in Michigan in 2022, 52 percent of which were performed through chemical abortions. CLI noted that “abortions performed on women who do not live in Michigan were excluded” because those statistics are not reported to the state government. The organization estimates that about nine percent of abortions are due to missing data.
Operating in a state with strong abortion support can be challenging, but Alpha Care Center perseveres.
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“We have to make sure we dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,” Wellwood said. “We have to be very careful because we could be the next state to receive these cease and desist letters saying, ‘You are no longer allowed to operate.'”
The awareness of such a climate can be discouraging, but as St. Paul notes in Scripture, steadfastness is essential.
Wellwood told people considering whether to volunteer or become a PRC worker, as well as people already in pregnancy care who may be feeling discouraged, “If you can be a friend to someone, you can do this (job). Everyone needs a cheerleader, someone to stand by their side and just say, ‘I’m here – you don’t have to go through this alone.’ I would encourage anyone who is unsure to just give it a try.”
Editor’s note: Heartbeat International manages Pregnancy Help News.
