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Meet Connie Stark
Connie Stark has spent more than 30 years transforming fertility care, helping aspiring parents navigate the emotional and practical challenges of reproductive health. She is a nationally recognized leader, fertility leadership coach, and clinician who pioneered approaches that establish fertility coaching as an essential part of reproductive healthcare. Her work bridges clinical expertise, leadership, and innovation, building systems that support families beyond treatment alone.
There’s a phrase that has guided Connie’s life journey, personally and professionally: making a difference for the better good.
Every decision she has made, from patient care to system-building, has been driven by that belief. It isn’t an aspirational language to her. It’s a filter. If the work creates a meaningful impact beyond herself, it’s worth doing. If it doesn’t, she moves on.
At Robyn, Connie didn’t just lead a program, she reimagined how fertility coaching could scale nationally. As Director of Fertility Coaching Services, she collaborated with cross-functional teams to build a digitally accessible platform in partnership with Ferring Pharmaceuticals. She created, designed, staffed, and launched a program that reached more than 22,000 aspiring parents in under three years, achieving 95% satisfaction rates. Her Five Points of Wellbeing methodology became a model for comprehensive, scalable fertility support.
Thirty years of lived experience, clinical insight, and category creation converged at Robyn. Accessibility, standardization, credentialed coaching, and human connection proved that thoughtful support could reach the nation while remaining deeply personal.
1988: The Exam Room
She remembers the moment clearly: sitting on the exam table when the doctor said, “I don’t know if you’ll ever walk again.”
The sound of white paper crinkling beneath her. The room closing in. The doctor rolling his stool away, leaving her alone.
Later that day, her husband, already her partner in life, asked her a question that would quietly shape everything that followed:
“Do you want to walk again, or listen to empty promises?”
It wasn’t pressure. It was clarity.
Connie made a decision. She would walk again.
She wept, gathered her crutches, wiped her tears, and moved down the hallway. Phones rang. People passed between rooms. Conversations and laughter echoed. The healthcare system hummed along, business as usual.
Did anyone know? Did anyone care that her life had just turned upside down?
That moment of uncertainty, invisibility, and fear shaped everything she would build over the next three decades.
The Parallel: Validated Over 30 Years
Connie knows the unmet need aspiring parents feel, because she felt it first. The exam room in 1988 mirrors the fertility clinic today: different diagnoses, the same crinkling paper, the same room closing in, the same invisibility, the same fear.
Thousands of aspiring parents have shared these experiences with her: the coldness of the room, the isolation of waiting for life-altering news. The system keeps moving, while your world stops.
She lived it in 1988. Aspiring parents live it now.
This isn’t an assumption. It’s been validated through thousands of honest, vulnerable conversations across 30 years, in person, virtually, and via text. Every fertility journey is unique, but the core needs are universal:
- Human connection
- Credible information
- A credentialed expert who meets you where you are, without judgment or comparison
This insight became the cornerstone of her methodology: support that scales without losing the human element.
Building What Didn’t Exist: Category Creation
When Connie began her work, fertility coaching wasn’t a recognized profession. From 1989 to 2014, she worked full-time in clinics across academic, private practice, and corporate settings, observing patterns, developing frameworks, and pitching the concept to physicians who saw its value but feared risk.
So she built it anyway, not because it was safe, but because it was needed.
Her Five Points of Wellbeing framework grew directly from her own experience addressing holistic wellbeing after 1988. Years later, she watched aspiring parents navigate infertility with the same compounded strain. Her methodology wasn’t theoretical; it was earned through lived experience and refined through thousands of patient interactions.
In 2014, Connie founded and led A.R.T. of Wellness, a fertility coaching practice. Eight years later, that foundation scaled nationally through Robyn, delivering credentialed coaching that treats people, not protocols.
The Entrepreneurial Reality: Messy, Simultaneous Building
While founding and leading A.R.T. of Wellness, she continued full-time clinic work, consulted for digital fertility startups, raised three children, and managed chronic pain from her 1988 injury.
Days were relentless: full clinic shifts, startup strategy after hours, frameworks drafted on weekends, and kids shuttled between games and commitments. This is entrepreneurship as it actually happens, messy, exhausting, and driven by necessity. You build because you must, not because there’s time. Every patient interaction informed the next framework. The building happened while living the work, not stepping away from it.
Robyn: Where Everything Converged
By the time Connie joined Robyn, she had spent three decades preparing, creating, and innovating. Robyn wasn’t a pivot, it was the first place her entire body of work could finally live at scale.
As part of Robyn’s core leadership team, she collaborated on a strategic partnership with Ferring Pharmaceuticals and developed a national fertility coaching platform. Working alongside product, technology, and operations teams, the group pioneered a digital coaching model from the ground up. Connie hired and trained five fertility nurse coaches, establishing collaborative practices rooted in shared expertise and mutual support.
Her role expanded into new territory: marketing, brand strategy, remote team leadership, and national media appearances, including Fox 32 Chicago, CBS Austin, Contemporary OB/GYN, Pregnantish, and TheSkimm.
She didn’t lead from above. She led alongside her team. One moment stayed with her: a coach struggling with a resistant patient said, “I don’t know how to help someone who won’t let me in.”
Connie replied, “Maybe she doesn’t need you to help her yet. Maybe she just needs you to be present.”
Weeks later, the patient said, “You’re the only person who didn’t try to fix me.”
That philosophy, holding space, not forcing progress, became foundational to the platform. The results followed: 22,000+ parents reached 95% satisfaction rates, improved clinic retention, and earlier access to care.
What the team built at Robyn proved what the industry had long questioned: comprehensive fertility support can scale nationally without losing its humanity.
Living With Purpose, Not Despite Challenges
Eighteen years. That’s how long it took.
From 1988 to 2006, Connie lived through wheelchairs, crutches, and canes, determined to walk without assistance, with no roadmap for what healing and recovery might look like. Progress was slow, nonlinear, and often invisible to anyone but her. Still, she kept going.
Connie lives with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain that takes on many different daily dimensions. Yet the adventure of life and action has never left her spirit. She walks strong, runs 5Ks, hikes, skydives, travels, and takes on adventurous challenges because they reconnect her to a core truth she has lived by for decades:
If she can, she will.
Each adventure opens new pathways of feeling limitless, of reconnecting to her best self, not because pain disappeared, but because purpose remained.
This isn’t an overcoming story. It’s about purpose, persistence, and being present in what is, not what was or what might be. The question guiding her isn’t comparison to others. It lives within her own spirit:
Can I be better than I was yesterday?
That simple question drives every choice.
That’s what resilience looks like.
Family as Foundation
Connie’s personal life anchors her professional courage. One of her sons once asked, “How did you know it was okay to start something that didn’t exist yet?”
She replied, “I didn’t know it was okay. I just knew it was needed.”
Her marriage of 34 years has been her foundation since before 1988. Her husband became her constant through injury, recovery, career building, and raising three children, providing solid ground when certainty didn’t exist.
Guiding Principles
- “If I can, I will.”
- “I’m in the practice, not above it.”
- “Can I be better than I was yesterday?”
Good isn’t good enough. Good is the starting point for becoming great. Great becomes the gold standard. The standard becomes what’s expected. And once expectations are met, we keep building beyond them.
Forward Vision: 2026 and Beyond
Connie’s current focus is policy, standards, and systemic impact. She is establishing fertility coaching as a recognized healthcare profession, with credentialing standards, practice guidelines, and full integration into fertility care teams.
In 2026, she is rolling out frameworks to support fertility nurses transitioning into coaching roles, creating infrastructure that didn’t exist when she started. She is also translating 2025–2026 fertility benefits legislation into actionable guidance for aspiring parents, employers, and clinics. The gap existed. She closed it.
Connie doesn’t wait for permission. She doesn’t accept good enough. She builds systems that center humanity, always in service of making a difference for the better good.
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