Celebrating National Breastfeeding Month: Meet Brandi Gates Burgess, IBCLC, Founder of Breast Friends
Every August, we pause to celebrate the parents, babies, and families navigating the beautiful, often complicated journey of breastfeeding and the dedicated professionals who walk alongside them. This National Breastfeeding Month, we continue our spotlight series introducing you to the lactation providers who make up the heart of California’s breastfeeding support community and who you’ll soon be able to find through our brand-new LATCH Directory.
Next up: Brandi Gates Burgess, IBCLC and founder of Breast Friends.
Meet Brandi
Brandi’s journey into lactation work started the way it does for so many providers: as a breastfeeding mom herself. She had her first child while still in college, and had grown up in a breastfeeding household. Though she initially only planned to nurse for six months, A WIC breastfeeding class changed that. Watching a facilitator stack Legos to visually compare the benefits of breast milk to formula, Brandi had a moment of clarity: this is what they wanted she wanted for her baby. She went on to breastfeed her daughter for 19 months, supported by a strong WIC community in Riverside.
When family circumstances brought her back to the Bay Area, she noticed the support systems she’d relied on in Riverside simply didn’t exist there in the same way. Not long after, a WIC counselor took notice of Brandi’s commitment to exclusive breastfeeding and encouraged her to apply for a newly created breastfeeding peer counselor position, funded by a new wave of USDA breastfeeding support dollars. It was, as Brandi describes it, a perfect fit and it launched her into a world of lactation work she hadn’t known existed.
That first job reshaped her academic path, too. She switched her college major from political science to sociology, drawn to studying the ways breastfeeding intersected with health, mental wellness, and family stability in Black communities. Conversations she felt weren’t being had nearly enough. As she moved through the field, working closely with a supervising lactation consultant, a client’s simple question — “why can’t you help me?” — became the spark that pushed her to pursue her own IBCLC credential. Alongside a small cohort of fellow young peer counselors, she studied, logged her clinical hours, and sat for the exam. They all passed.
Brandi has now worked in lactation for over 15 years, building experience across WIC agencies, community clinics, hospitals, and private practice. Along the way, she encountered real barriers common to many young providers of color entering a field that, at the time, didn’t reflect the communities it served — barriers that only deepened her resolve to build something different.
That resolve led her to West Oakland WIC, where she found a director willing to invest in her as a lactation consultant, and where she began developing what would become her life’s work. Through a community grant, Brandi started running breastfeeding education and support efforts at a local OB clinic and quickly discovered that most mothers didn’t need convincing to breastfeed. They needed someone to actually teach them how, and a community to lean on when things got hard.
That insight led to the birth of a peer support group, inspired by one mother’s own words: what she needed most wasn’t more information it was “a breast friend.” The group started with six mothers meeting once a month. It grew to 25, then more, with strollers lining the hallway and neighbors bringing neighbors. Brandi and her team layered in food demonstrations, peer mentorship, and open conversation, creating a space that mothers described as judgment-free one where breastfeeding support was just the entry point into a much deeper community.
When the pandemic disrupted in-person gatherings, Brandi pivoted the group to Instagram Live, keeping the connection alive in a new format. Around the same time, while on maternity leave with her son, she made the decision to formalize her work into a nonprofit and Breast Friends was born.
The early years were lean. Brandi and her husband personally funded groups, supplies, and outreach out of pocket long before any grant funding arrived. A pivotal shift came when she left her WIC position and devoted herself to Breast Friends full-time, pouring in structured hours every day as though it were her job because now, it was. In 2023, after applying for grant after grant, Breast Friends received its first award: $25,000. It was the validation Brandi needed to keep building.
From there, momentum grew. Breast Friends secured a contract with Bloom, a pediatric clinic dedicated to serving Black families, and began hosting community events starting with a barbecue that drew about 40 families and growing, within a few years, to gatherings of 130 or more. Last year alone, Breast Friends served nearly 700 families across the communities it reaches.
Brandi built her peer counselor model around workforce development: hiring and training mothers who had come through Breast Friends themselves, mirroring the path that had once been opened for her. To date, the organization has hired and trained 15 breastfeeding peer counselors, mentored two women of color through their IBCLC exams, and currently has three more preparing to sit for the credential this year. Breast Friends now operates with a full board, a program manager, a data lead, and a growing team of contracted IBCLCs, alongside a dedicated dads’ group supporting fathers in the breastfeeding journey.
With a newly awarded multi-year grant, Breast Friends is expanding into Vallejo, Stockton, and San Francisco, adding new peer counselors along the way. Brandi’s vision for what’s next is clear: a fully funded organization, a home base office, and a name as recognizable in the community as any major provider all without ever losing the personal, judgment-free spirit the organization was built on.
About LATCH Directory
Brandi is one of the many dedicated lactation providers across the state of California. Many of which you can find on the LATCH Directory, a new statewide tool from the California Breastfeeding Coalition (CBC) designed to connect families with qualified lactation support quickly, easily, and in the setting that works for them. Whether a family is looking for one-on-one IBCLC support, a peer-led community group, or culturally specific care, LATCH Directory is built to make that search simple.
LATCH Directory is made possible through the CLASP-BC grant, and it’s just the first piece of a larger, statewide initiative CBC is building to strengthen breastfeeding support across California. Following the Directory’s launch, CBC will also roll out a Warmline for support in 2027.
Interested in working with Brandi? You can learn more about Brandi Gates Burgess and Breast Friends directly at breastfriendslactation.org.
Get Listed
If you’re a lactation provider and you’d like to be included in LATCH Directory, we’d love to have you submit a listing at directory.californiabreastfeeding.org/submit!