Stephanie Wellwood stepped into the role of executive director of two pregnancy medical resource centers in Michigan earlier this year. After she attended the 53rd annual Heartbeat International Conference in April, she returned home with new insights and ideas.
The conference took place April 24 – 26, 2024 in Salt Lake City.
“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 yet, attending the break-out session I went to was something that was challenging, and I wanted to go back and learn more about artificial intelligence and how we can use that at our center, whether that’s with donors or seeing how we can reach [pregnant women] more effectively.”
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Newsletters, thank-you letters, and social media marketing are some aspects where AI can be incorporated, she added.
“We have to heavily consider where we’re putting things out,” she said. “Who is our target audience and are we really reaching our target audience?”
Wellwood said she and her team, including a recently hired marketing coordinator, use social media to reach the Gen Z audience, and they also use personal outreach through local events. Alpha Care Center operates medical resource clinics in Lowell, Mich., and another in Lake Odessa. The centers are about 25 miles apart. The Lake Odessa clinic is located in a smaller, rural area, she said, and therefore, county fairs and community events, such as county expos and community resource fairs, reach many people, including the age-group Alpha desires to see. Parades, involving floats and “lots of candy,” are other ways to let the two communities know about the PRCs, Wellwood said.
“We get our volunteers, and we wrap a lot of Smarties® [with a poem about life],” she said.
Another takeaway from the conference was more personal.
“I need to safeguard my personal time. Many of the sessions I attended were along that new director track. It’s so easy to get in over your head, and so you really have to safeguard that time with your family,” Wellwood said.
Stepping into leadership
She began her service 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 fill the vacant position. Due to a relatively new marriage, a career that provided health insurance, and other reasonings, she said she declined. Her church offered to consider her as a missionary and a congregant offered to pay her health insurance if she took the job. She began her new role in January of this year.
She often still serves as an advocate.
“I don’t ask my staff to do anything I wouldn’t do,” Wellwood said.
In many ways she understands the fears and concerns women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy experience. Wellwood was a single mother. Her former husband walked out on her and their children when those children were toddlers. Her kids are now adults and within the past few years, Wellwood remarried. Her husband Brian is very supportive of his wife’s new non-profit job, and he attended this year’s Heartbeat conference with her.
Center history
Alpha Care Center began services as part of larger organization, a group of pregnancy resource centers known as Alpha Women’s Center of West Michigan. During the mid-2000s, Lowell became its own entity, Wellwood said, and in 2016, the organization rebranded to Alpha Family Center of Lowell to be more welcoming to men.
“We were offering a GED program open to both males and females,” 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 leadership and requested consideration of a satellite location in their community. Wellwood attended that church.
“As a church, we wanted to have a ministry in our own community,” she said. “We had looked at several pregnancy resource centers in our area and we agreed that the Alpha Family Center [was the best fit] – their statement of faith aligned with ours – and we approached them about a partnership.”
In January 2019, the board of directors began exploring that request, and the doors to that second, satellite center, opened the following January. Then the pandemic crisis created a hurdle.
“But COVID didn’t keep us down,” Wellwood said.
Virtual classes became the dominant way to interact with clients.
The Lake Odessa clinic is located about 23 miles southeast of Lowell and is also a medical clinic.
In addition to pregnancy testing, Alpha nursing staff provide limited obstetrical ultrasounds and STD testing. Support, encouragement, and referrals are primary offerings, Wellwood said.
Another rebranding took place in 2022.
“We decided to change our name from the Alpha Family Center to Alpha Care Center,” she said. “We were told that the word ‘family’ and the logo we had attached to it was a deterrent to abortion-minded women, and we wanted to try and focus on bringing in those abortion-minded women.”
In 2023, more than 130 unique clients were served at both clinics, and during the first quarter of this year, Alpha Care Center staff have assisted more than 60, Wellwood shared with Pregnancy Help News.
Pro-life in a pro-abortion state
Michigan is an abortion state. Abortions are done through all nine months of pregnancy there since the state removed protection for the unborn given them in a 1931 law. That historic law was declared unconstitutional by a Michigan court in September 2022. During that year’s November election, a proposal to establish “a state constitutional right to ‘reproductive freedom,’ including abortion, passed with a vote of 56.7 percent to 43.3 percent,” according to a report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI).
That same report shows more than 30,000 abortions reported in Michigan during 2022 with 52 percent of those done via chemical abortions. CLI noted “abortions on nonresident women[were] excluded,” as those statistics are not reported to the state government. The organization estimated that lack of data results in about nine percent of abortion procedures.
Operating in a major pro-abortion state can be challenging, but Alpha Care Center perseveres.
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“We have to make sure we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s,” Wellwood said. “We have to be very careful because we could be that next state that’s going to be issued those letters of ‘cease and desist, you can no longer operate.’”
Awareness of such a climate can be discouraging but fortitude is critical, as St. Paul notes in Scripture.
For people considering whether they should volunteer or become a staff member with a PRC, as well as those already involved in pregnancy help who may feel discouraged, Wellwood said, “If you can be a friend to somebody, you can do this [work]. Everybody needs a cheerleader, somebody to come alongside them and just say, ‘I’m here – you don’t have to go through this alone.’ I would encourage anyone who is on the fence to just to give it a try.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages Pregnancy Help News.
