Meet our Board

President

Nickie Tilsner, RN, BSN (she/her) is a nurse leader, educator, and longtime harm reductionist with over two decades of experience advancing community-rooted care. Based in both Portland, Oregon and the Bay Area, California, Nickie’s work bridges reproductive health, substance use care, and public health research. She served the Bay Area as a doula for over 18 years, and has spent the last 19 years training doulas through a justice-centered lens.

Nickie is the Co-Founder of Cornerstone Birthwork Training, a nationally respected program committed to trauma-informed, culturally responsive doula education, and currently serves as President of the Cornerstone Oakland Doula Collaborative, a nonprofit advancing Reproductive Justice through scholarships, advocacy, and community-based care.

She is a proud graduate of OHSU School of Nursing (magna cum laude) and of the pre-nursing program at Mills College, where she later designed and led the first for-credit doula training course in a U.S. university, offered through Mills’ Health Equity and Public Health program.

Nickie also serves as the Nursing Services Program Manager at Cascadia Health Primary Care, where she leads systems-level initiatives to integrate harm reduction, nursing case management, and equity-based practice into community health settings.

She previously led the implementation of a nationally recognized hepatitis C intervention for young people who use drugs in Sacramento and Newark, and she is the soon-to-be Co Principal Investigator on a groundbreaking study integrating doulas and harm reduction to support smoking reduction and cessation during pregnancy.

At the heart of her work is a commitment to co-creating systems of care that are community-driven, responsive, and justice-rooted—emerging from the leadership, wisdom, and lived experience of the communities they are meant to serve.