WUUM Los Angeles
Santa Monica, historically a place where new ideas take root, welcomes WUUM, the new women’s center designed to serve women from birth to sagehood. Post-COVID, women everywhere are rethinking how they want to live, work, and connect. Burnout is rampant, maternal health outcomes in the U.S. are alarming, and loneliness is at an all-time high. WUUM arrives at a moment when many women are searching for alternatives—spaces of belonging, care, and purpose.
Embodying the spirit of collective care, education, creativity, and transformation, WUUM feels like the best version of home. I say this aloud, drinking aromatic tea with four of the five co-founders and the Director of Operations on a recent Wednesday evening. “We wanted it to feel like a woman’s home,” affirms co-founder Neha Shah, MPT, CYT. “Somewhere you’re not in a rush to leave.”
The space at 202 Bicknell feels intentional but not fussy. It’s far from sterile, instead exuding a lighthearted seriousness, calmness without the tinkling phoniness of a wellness spa, as trustworthy as only authentic warmth can be. Like its name, which reminds us: “Mothers make the world go round.”
WUUM Co-Founders
Opening its doors after nearly two years of dreaming, planning, and retrofitting, WUUM offers group therapy, plant studies classes, supper clubs-cum-author events, women’s circles, and even dance parties for moms who need joyful movement and want to be home by 10 pm. Sound baths and yoga classes fill the calendar, alongside panels on midlife, parenting at every age, moon circles, and body literacy workshops. All bound by a shared mission: to empower women with knowledge and respect, rather than passing out pat answers and conflicting prescriptions.
Neha, a physical therapist, spent years working with clients in her private practice. When she faced perimenopause herself, she was shocked at the fragmentation of women’s care. “I kept thinking—where do we go? Who will listen and offer holistic solutions?”
Practical, integrated care is one of WUUM’s most powerful innovations. At WUUM, Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy, Herbal Support, Acupuncture, and Lactation Support share space. A new mother could spend three hours here, moving between providers without shuttling across town. Each of the founders reiterated: “It’s exhausting and ineffectual running from office to office, piecing together care. We need one place.”
That need resonated with others. Stacey Tannenbaum-McIver L.M.F.T, another co-founder and a marriage and family therapist whose son is best friends with Neha’s, had long dreamed of opening a center like this.
What started as conversations turned into women’s circles, perimenopause gatherings at Sunset Park Provisions, and late-night brainstorming sessions. From seeds of need to a sanctuary, WUUM took shape. “We wanted it to be boutiquey in terms of specialized, holistic care, but welcoming, accessible, and affordable,” Stacey says. “This isn’t a luxury club. It’s for every woman.”
Together, they began to imagine a women’s center that didn’t just treat symptoms, but embraced the whole arc of being female—pregnancy, puberty, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause, and beyond. Each sees the stages of a woman’s life as opportunities for more nuanced care.
Much of the center’s philosophy comes as a response to how women have historically been treated in healthcare. “So many female transitions are either ignored or pathologized,” Kimberly Mills, IBCLC, a co-founder and lactation specialist, says. “We’re told: ‘Don’t sleep with your baby, you’re doing it wrong, at least the baby’s fine.’ But what about the mother?”
WUUM tries to fill those gaps—reframing motherhood as a transformation, not just a medical event. It’s taken us centuries to realize the most obvious (and deepest) truth: a baby is only as emotionally stable as their caregiver. “When a mom receives bodywork, her baby visibly relaxes. And vice versa,” Kimmy says. “Connection and co-regulation are one and the same.”
I sometimes add the tagline, “Only in L.A.” with an affectionate giggle. But I’ll never forget a visit to Santa Monica with my then-baby son. After living in a place unwelcome to nursing, stepping into The Pump Station, a relief indistinguishable from joy flooded my heart. Years later, in WUUM, on a comfy couch in a room spangled by natural light, near a farmhouse-style table spread with deliciously healthy snacks, sharing my frightening labor and delivery story with these women, my heart lightens.
Recognizing and amplifying boys/men’s roles adds a necessary puzzle piece to the idea of connection. WUUM plans to offer workshops designed for new fathers and for dads of teen girls, as well as partner birthing classes.
The best learning is inclusive, whether that’s defined as holistic, intergenerational, or interdisciplinary. Ideally, as in nature, all three pillars exist simultaneously. Trish Mazure, a skilled gardener/herbalist and another WUUM co-founder, and I met this past winter and bonded over our love of dancing. “We flow in and out of stages,” Trish says. “They’re not hard stops. As plants show us, growth doesn’t happen that way.”
While the practitioners at WUUM guard against unexamined or assumed "knowledge" and dictated “meaning”—like such and such terrible thing will happen as soon as you hit 40—it’s helpful to share the kaleidoscope spectrum of our joys and struggles through these transitions.
At its core, WUUM is about support. Support for new mothers navigating sleepless nights. Support for women moving through divorce. Support for elders stepping into sagehood.
“Unless we have truly comprehensive care, we will sadly endure all the silent costs incurred from isolation,” Neha says. “We’re not supposed to do it alone.”
While WUUM is a group effort focused on fostering community, the center is self-funded—no corporate backers, no investors betting on profits. Another co-founder, Sheila Shelati, Psy. D., an entrepreneur in the behavioral health sector, provides the financial know-how. This independence allows WUUM to experiment, listen, and evolve without pressure to conform. The founders see themselves less as directors and more as stewards of something that belongs to every woman who walks through the door.
In doing so, WUUM builds relationships. Women come for classes or panels and end up staying for tea, conversation, and laughter. As Director of Operations, Haley Blair, MSEd, Certified Coach, empowers women to re-find themselves “within motherhood.” Haley muses, “I believe we sense our collective power. WUUM grants us a container we can all hold together.”
WUUM has ambitions beyond its walls. The team dreams of doing education and outreach in preschools, as well as K-12, so girls grow up knowing about their bodies instead of being left in the dark and boys can grow up to be more informed and therefore more compassionate partners and co-parents. They hope to collaborate with chefs offering classes in making nourishing foods, such as bone broth, for couples embarking on conception journeys, teen girls navigating their changing bodies, and postpartum/nursing mothers.
The mission has shifted and evolved. “We let it guide us,” Stacey says. “The zeitgeist after COVID was about community, about finding your people. Now that we’ve moved beyond a phase of battening down the hatches, we can be that much more expansive.”
They’re wonderfully open to new ideas. “As long as it supports women, we want to hear it,” says Trish. Already, a death doula, midwives, and divorce lawyers have joined the roster. The flexibility means WUUM can respond to whatever the community needs, rather than dictating from above. As the founders like to say, WUUM isn’t just about programs or panels—it’s about being a woman, and everything that means.
At the launch party, the co-founders looked around at what they had built, dazed. “We made this. It’s ours.” Nine months from idea to opening, WUUM feels less like a living ecosystem, a wall composed of biodynamic plants. It’s constantly evolving, growing new branches, and deepening its roots. Just like the women it serves.
WUUM thrums as a powerful reminder that when women are cared for, the world is cared for. “Rather than paying lip service, we’re nourishing women and their families.”
WUUM
202 Bicknell Ave
www.wuumla.com