I Studied Community-Building in Graduate School. Then Infertility Made Me Live It.
Peer-led infertility support means groups facilitated by people with lived experience of infertility - not clinicians, coaches, or moderators reading from a script. Cove Collective co-founder Allie came to peer-led design twice: first through graduate training in public administration and years building community programs, then through her own infertility journey. For people navigating IVF, IUI, unexplained infertility, DOR, POI, PCOS/PMOS, endometriosis, recurrent pregnancy loss, donor conception, surrogacy, LGBTQIA+ family building, or independent parenthood, Cove Collective is a peer-led online infertility support group — private, app-based, and here 24/7. Here's why Cove was built peer-led on purpose.
For a full guide to evaluating infertility support options, see How to Find the Right Infertility Support Group.
My first career was communities
Before Cove existed, I had a different life in community work. I managed grant and scholarship programs at a community foundation, and ran civic engagement groups in my “free time”. I built coalitions between nonprofits, city governments, funders, and residents. I finished a Master’s in Public Administration where my capstone work centered on one question, over and over, in different forms:
What makes a support system actually work for the people it claims to serve?
I didn't know it yet, but I was writing the blueprint for Cove.
The principle that changed everything
One of the projects I'm proudest of from that chapter was a community impact framework I helped develop - a way of organizing an entire region's philanthropy around shared goals. And the single most important decision we made wasn't about money, metrics, or strategy.
It was about seats at the table.
We made a deliberate, structural commitment: the people experiencing the problems would help decide what was needed - not just the people in positions of privilege looking in from the outside. Working groups were built bottom-up, not top-down. Lived experience wasn't a nice anecdote to include in the annual report, it was a qualification.
In my research and my practice, the pattern held everywhere I looked: when the people being served have real power in a system, the system stays honest. When they don't, the system eventually serves itself.
Then I went through infertility. And I watched that exact failure happen to me as a patient.
Infertility support, as currently designed, is top-down
Think about where you're "supposed" to get support during infertility:
Your clinic supports your protocol… in fifteen-minute increments, between blood draws, from staff who are kind but gone by 4pm. The wellness industry supports your purchasing decisions, selling you supplements and journals and courses optimized for conversion, not connection. Even many support spaces are built top-down: a figurehead broadcasting to an audience, an algorithm deciding which grief gets engagement, a free Facebook or Reddit group with 50,000 members and no one who actually knows your name.
None of these are necessarily bad. But none of them are yours. You are the subject of all of them and the author of none of them.
In public administration we'd call this an accountability gap: the people most affected have the least influence over how the thing is run. In real life, it feels like sitting in your car in the clinic parking lot after another canceled cycle, scrolling for someone -anyone- who gets it, and finding only noise.
What peer-led actually means (and why we're stubborn about it)
When Jenn and I built Cove, "peer-led" wasn't a marketing adjective. It was the structural answer to everything I'd studied and everything I'd lived.
Peer-led means the women holding the space have sat in the stirrups, watched the phone, and learned what a beta number is the hard way. It means support is shaped by members, not broadcast at them. It means the community is small enough, private enough, and intentional enough that you're a person here, not a username.
It also means accountability runs in the right direction. My graduate work included a case study of a major support organization that imploded because leadership had insulated itself from the very people it served - no transparency, no feedback loops, no voice for members. The collapse was predictable. It was designed in. I think about that case constantly, because it's the cautionary tale for anyone building community: structure isn't the boring part. Structure is the promise.
So Cove's structure is the promise.
Text-based, so support fits into real life: the 6am monitoring appointment, the lunch-break spiral, the 2am insomnia.
Private, so you can be honest without performing.
Peer-led, so the people who shape this community are the people living what you're living.
The research is the how. Infertility is the why.
Here's the thing I want you to take from my slightly unusual résumé: peer-led community isn't the scrappy, lesser alternative to "real" support. It's the evidence-aligned model. Decades of work in public administration, community development, and social capital research keep arriving at the same place: durable change happens through networks of people with shared stakes, not through services delivered at them.
But I'll be honest: the research isn't why I built Cove. The research is why I built Cove this way.
I built Cove because infertility is the loneliest crowded room in the world. Full of women going through the same thing at the same time, each feeling like she's the only one. The degree taught me how to build the room. Infertility taught me how much actually being in the room yourself really matters.
If you're navigating infertility and looking for the right kind of support, How to Find the Right Infertility Support Group is a good place to start. You don't have to do this alone, community is just a click away.
→ Try Cove Collective free
Cove Family Co. was founded by two women who spent years navigating infertility. Cove Collective is an online infertility support group — private, app-based, and here 24/7 — built from lived experience and still actively maintained by its founders.
