TEAM & ADVISORY
Supporting the professionals supporting women.
Peony PRO exists because the people doing this work — across oncology, rehabilitation, nutrition, mental health, integrative care, and advocacy — deserve better infrastructure than they have.
WHY WE EXIST
The challenge is not a lack of expertise. It's integration.
Every day, practitioners help women navigate some of the most consequential decisions of their lives. They educate, guide, advocate, listen, coordinate, and support — usually while keeping up with a research landscape that moves faster than any one person can follow.
Most of them are trained deeply within a single discipline, and rarely have structured opportunities to learn alongside professionals approaching the same woman from a different angle.
Peony PRO was built to close that gap: shared education, a common framework, credential verification that means something, and a reason for practitioners across disciplines to know one another.
Integrative care begins with integrative thinking.
OUR ORIGIN
Founded by a midwife. Written during treatment.
Sarah Glynn is a clinically trained midwife, publisher, and educator with more than two decades of experience bringing evidence-informed health education to professionals and consumers.
She founded the first international exchange program and online college for out-of-hospital midwives, launched major online education platforms including programs with Sounds True, produced the Dragonfly Health series on Gaia TV, and hosts Wellness Week in Boulder, Colorado, convening leaders across integrative and conventional medicine.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer five years after losing her mother to the same disease.
She received excellent clinical care — and still found herself largely responsible for everything surrounding it. Understanding complex information. Coordinating supportive care. Making sense of integrative options. Navigating the long stretches between appointments. She knew what she was looking for, and could not find it in one trusted place.
The Peony Care Method™ was developed during that treatment.
WHAT MIDWIFERY CONTRIBUTED
A model built for exactly this problem.
What stood out across Sarah's career was not any particular therapy. It was the model of care.
Midwifery is organized around a person facing complex decisions, multiple providers, conflicting information, high emotional stakes, and a need for trusted guidance through all of it. It developed continuity of care, shared decision-making, preparation before and support after, and coordination across a team — because the alternative produced worse experiences and worse outcomes.
The parallels to breast cancer are not decorative:
- Complex decisions under time pressure
- Multiple providers who rarely speak to each other
- Information overload
- Conflicting recommendations
- A long arc rather than a single event
- The need for someone who holds the whole picture
Maternal health spent decades building models for that. Peony applies those principles to breast cancer care — not as a replacement for medical treatment, but as a way to strengthen the experience surrounding it.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
The principles that guide the work.
- The challenge is integration, not expertise. The people in this field are extraordinarily good at what they do. What's missing is connection between them.
- No single practitioner has all the answers — and the ones who serve women best are the ones who know it.
- Evidence over enthusiasm. Conventional and complementary approaches each have a role, applied responsibly and within scope. Where the research is thin, we say so.
- Scope, held clearly. Learning beyond your discipline is not the same as practicing beyond it.
- The woman owns her plan. Not her practitioner, not her care team, not Peony.
- Technology should strengthen human relationships, not replace them.
- Supporting practitioners is how you support more women. That is the whole theory of the organization.
GOVERNANCE
Who decides what the standards say.
Peony publishes its own professional and education standards. That only means something if it is clear who governs them and how they change.
The Advisory Board approves the Standards of Practice and the governing frameworks — the Care Method and the Care Plan Guide — before publication, and advises on curriculum and certificate conferral.
The Program Director is accountable for the certificate program and its documents, and makes final certificate-conferral decisions.
Instructors propose changes from teaching experience and apply the current published versions.
Every published edition of the Standards records its approving authority, approval date, effective date, and next scheduled review. Approved changes and their rationale are recorded, so the history of the standards is traceable.
These are Peony's own published standards for its program and community. They carry no statutory, governmental, or national regulatory authority — and we do not present them as though they do.
ADVISORY BOARD
Announced as confirmed.
The Peony Advisory Board is being assembled across medical oncology, surgical oncology, radiation oncology, oncology nursing and navigation, rehabilitation, integrative oncology, nutrition, mental health and survivorship, genetics, and patient advocacy — alongside women with lived experience of breast cancer.
Members will be announced as appointments are confirmed.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING
Early work, described as early work.
What exists today is a defined role, a method, a certificate program, a capstone model, and the first partnerships. What is intended is a durable, evidence-based, respected allied profession.
Our development path is a sequence, not a claim:
- Pilot the certificate program and role with early partners
- Evaluate and revise the curriculum from cohort experience
- Gather participant and learner feedback systematically
- Calibrate instructors so assessment holds to one standard
- Take clinical partner feedback on integration and fit
- Define meaningful outcomes before making outcome claims
- Review the published standards as evidence accumulates
Each step precedes the claims it would support. We do not present outcomes, recognition, or credentialing structures before they exist.
OUR NORTH STAR
Better supported practitioners. Better supported women.
When practitioners have access to better education, stronger professional networks, greater visibility, and more opportunities to learn from one another, women benefit.
They benefit from broader perspectives. From better communication between the people treating them. From more connected support. And from practitioners who understand that healing involves more than treatment alone.
We are not simply building a network. It is a future where every woman facing breast cancer has access to the information, support, and care she needs — and does not have to assemble it herself.
HOW WE HELP
Four ways the work reaches practice.
The Classroom
weekly expert-led education, emerging research, and multidisciplinary learning.
LEARN MORE →The Network
credential-verified listings that help women find trusted support, and help practitioners find each other.
LEARN MORE →The Certificate
preparing Cancer Companions™ to guide women through diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and survivorship using the Peony Care Method™.
LEARN MORE →The Tools
the Care Plan Toolkit, clinical protocols, and patient education, plus the technology that keeps a woman's plan current between appointments.
LEARN MORE →WHO WE SERVE
A multidisciplinary professional community.
Medical Oncologists · Radiation Oncologists · Breast Surgeons · Oncology Nurses · Nurse Navigators · Nurse Practitioners · Physician Assistants · Physical and Occupational Therapists · Lymphedema Specialists · Exercise Oncology Specialists · Registered Dietitians · Nutrition Professionals · Functional Medicine Practitioners · Integrative Medicine Providers · Psychologists, Therapists, and Counselors · Social Workers · Genetic Counselors · Health Coaches · Community Health Workers · Patient Advocates · Survivors Supporting Women · Nonprofits and Mission-Aligned Organizations
You're already doing this work.
Whether you're caring for women, educating professionals, conducting research, advocating, or helping shape what comes next — Peony PRO exists to support the people doing it.
Free to apply · Reviewed within five business days · Payment only after approval · $450 founding year