Emily Talley is a Certified Lactation Counselor and Speech Language Pathologist living in Blowing Rock, NC. She established Nurture Appalachia as a gathering of people, resources, and information to support babies and their families during a critical period of life. Emily practices privately and at Ashe Memorial Hospital, offering a range of services including lactation and feeding support for infants with feeding difficulties and pediatric feeding disorder.

“I decided to retrain as an SLP focusing on the 0-3 population after having spent over a decade in the relief and development sector designing and managing programs that supported families in crisis. The research and my experience showed me over and again how critical those early years, weeks, days are for shaping an individual and ultimately influencing a society. I was and am convinced that support networks for babies and their parents are of utmost importance. I wanted to facilitate that network. Be that support.

“And so I began the experiment of Nurture Appalachia. On the one hand, it is a simple effort to gather information in one place and point people to my own lactation counseling and infant feeding services. But hopefully it is more than that. Hopefully this initiative facilitates coordination among the many people working to improve infant feeding outcomes in the high country, spurring conversation, empowering parents and practitioners. Nurturing Appalachia.”