Women’s History Month Honoree – Jeanne Friebe

We were delighted to sit down this month with our board chair, Jeanne Friebe, BSN, RN, IBCLC, RNC-LRN. Her 45+ year career has made a huge impact on the lives of women and their babies in the St. Cloud community. This Women’s History month, we celebrate Jeanne!

From a young age, Jeanne was interested in breastfeeding. Her older sisters had babies, and she would eagerly help care for them, and give her sisters a little help. Her father worked at the VA and her mother worked at St. Cloud hospital, so a career in the healthcare industry felt natural to her. With the encouragement of her teachers, she went into nursing. Although she had her start in geriatric care, it was no surprise to anyone when her passion for babies soon led her to labor and delivery and postpartum.

It was her work with babies in the NICU that really started her passion for lactation counseling. She became an international board-certified lactation consultant (IBCLC) and a childbirth educator. After working at the hospital for 40 years, she moved to the CentraCare OB clinic and started a lactation program there. Working with families prenatally through birth and during the postpartum period has allowed her to educate and support families so they have better success with breastfeeding from the start.

During COVID, supplementation was at an all-time high, and with the formula shortage in 2022, Jeanne spent a lot of time teaching families hand expression and how to harvest colostrum. Over time, this became a greater passion of Jeanne’s, leading to her conducting a study and submitting a poster on colostrum collection to the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine in Baltimore, in 2023, with Dr. Chip Martin.

In April 2000 Jeanne opened a Baby Café with the support from CentraCare Clinic, Public Health and the St. Cloud Family YMCA, giving new parents a place to develop their breastfeeding journeys in community with one another. They still meet every Tuesday at the St. Cloud YMCA.

Jeanne opened a donor milk collection depot at the CentraCare Clinic for the Minnesota Milk Bank for Babies and joined their board in 2019, her first milk donation being from her daughter.

Providing lactation education and support prenatally through postpartum is critical and something Jeanne is very proud of. With a specialized focus on colostrum harvesting and her work with the Minnesota Milk Bank for Babies, Jeanne is proud of the impact she has made in the community.

When asked why she has stayed with CentraCare for over 45 years, she shared that this is the community where she has grown up, and where her children have grown up, and that is very important to her.

“It is all about investment, involvement and commitment to my community,” Jeanne shared. “Even if I have helped just one family, I feel good about that.”