So many of us have struggled through these last few difficult years. Now just imagine what it’s been like for our kids. These mental health stressors have hit our Rhode Island children especially hard– collateral damage of the uncertainty and isolation of COVID-19.

One out of every 3 kids is facing a serious mental health challenge– and all too often, help is not available.

We cannot sit still or stay silent.

We must act now!

So this year we’re doubling down on our efforts to end the children’s mental health crisis in Rhode Island, and making it our number one priority. And we’re asking you to join us.

We plan to expand our Children’s Mobile Crisis program, which provides immediate assistance to kids where and when they need it– 24/7.

Beyond offering acute care from our outpatient clinic at 55 Hope Street, we are rapidly expanding our staff to meet the needs of communities, schools, and homes– eliminating the lack of transportation as a barrier to care. We are committed to ensuring each family is able to connect with the services they need to thrive.

FSRI will be here for RI kids this year and always– and we hope you will be here for us. Will you help us get the word out about the crisis? Will you reach out to your personal and professional network to support this work? Will you volunteer with us? Will you make a donation today?

We realize that money is tight right now for so many– but we are hoping that many can give a little so that all can benefit a lot. Will you donate $50, $100, $500, or $1,000 to help OUR kids?

Right now, you can help end this crisis by ensuring that children who are suffering receive the support they need.  #JoinFSRI

With love and kindness for all,

Margaret Holland McDuff

• We helped over 23,000 family members to achieve healing and stability.
• Over 2,300 children were served through our early childhood programs.
• Rhode Island Government Leaders supported significant investments in the housing and human service sectors.
• We were thrilled to promote internal talent into leadership positions, including three to Vice Presidential roles for Hope, Home, and Equity & Community Development.
• We were excited to return to in-person events including the APRI Run/Walk and our biggest Brighter Futures Luncheon to date.

We are deeply grateful to Governor McKee, Speaker Shekarchi, Senate President Ruggiero, and House and Senate Leadership for their collective hard work to ensure rate increases and investments for Early Childhood and DCYF-funded programming, as well as to create a system to regularly review the array and rates of human service programming in our state, which will ensure access to services for those who need them and adequate funding for organizations who provide them, like FSRI. These actions can save vital services for future generations of vulnerable Rhode Island children and families.

Thank you for making a brighter future for our state’s children! 

The enormous impact of the COVID-19-inspired program has been featured in numerous articles highlighting the donations that poured in during the initial lockdown period, including a mention during an early pandemic press conference from then-Governor Gina Raimondo on March 26, 2020. 

“Family Service of Rhode Island is putting together kits and items such as disinfecting wipes, hand sanitizer and they’re arranging pickup and delivery of these kits for families in need,” she said in her daily COVID update. 

Raimondo urged individuals and companies to donate to the program, or reach out for free doorstep delivery of supplies for residents in need statewide.

But the Be Safe program at FSRI started weeks before with a simple idea—raise $5000 to buy enough PPE, cleaning supplies, and food to supply 200 FSRI clients that might need help finding and purchasing these items to keep themselves and their families safe.

It was an effort that FSRI leaders initially thought might last a week—or a few weeks.

But as time went on, that idea became a statewide movement in simple kindness. With a groundswell of support, volunteers and staff began assembling kits of supplies to be delivered to anyone that told us they needed one. The Be Safe campaign was born, bridging the accessibility gap for any Rhode Islander that needed it.

Over 25 area organizations donated supplies, time, effort, and money, alongside over 1200 everyday Rhode Islanders, who chipped in what they could– all while experiencing uncertainty themselves– to make sure their neighbors had what they needed to be safe, too.

On the one-year anniversary of the first COVID official case, the program had delivered enough supplies to serve 35,000 individual people.

As of today– over 2 years later, Be Safe, combined with its short-term sister program, Be Safe Fresh, has delivered enough food to feed 83,340 individual Rhode Islanders. Many of those deliveries were done by members of our AmeriCorps program.

For more information on the Be Safe program, or to make a request for an urban core delivery, visit the Be Safe page of our website by clicking here.

If you live outside our service area and need to find a local food pantry, click here.

Early Intervention and First Connections programs are a core component of the state’s commitment to ensuring that families with infants and toddlers with developmental delays and disabilities receive high-quality services as early as possible, so children can develop to their fullest potential.

But nonprofits that provide these mandated maternal and infant services face high staff turnover rates due to low wages– caused by a stagnant, 22-year-old state reimbursement rate— which is putting our most vulnerable children at risk of losing these services completely.

That’s why FSRI’s early childhood staff, including our CEO Margaret Holland McDuff, recently gave testimony in support of H-7628 to fund a stable system of care for Rhode Island children and families at the RI Statehouse.

Right now, there are only nine remaining EI service-providing agencies in Rhode Island, including FSRI. All have dealt with a workforce and financial crisis in recent years, which have now created a perfect storm of circumstances that is ultimately hurting at-risk children and families that need services most.

As a state, we have three choices:

• Force nonprofits to operate in the red to continue offering these critical, life-saving services, which at some point will cause a total system collapse.
• Close the early childhood programs altogether and be in violation of federal law.
• Have legislators increase their reimbursement rates now and into the future through H-7628.

Please call or email your legislator TODAY and make sure they know you support H-7628. You can find out who your representative is here.

Let’s put people first– because the future of young Rhode Islanders hangs in the balance.

Both gunmen were 18, both used semiautomatic firearms, and one had even previously threatened gun violence at his own high school. And while I can’t make sense of any of these events, I do know one thing. Thoughts and prayers don’t stop bullets. Only policy change can do that.

It’s time to act, both as an agency and as individuals. The twin tragedies in Buffalo and Uvalde were preventable incidents of gun violence, the trauma from which will resonate with both children and adults for years to come. FSRI is a leader in trauma-informed care, and our own staff can attest to the damage inflicted both physically and emotionally by gun violence here in our own community. That’s why common-sense gun laws are needed now, both nationally and here in Rhode Island.

Tell your legislators you support common-sense gun laws. The mental health– and literally the lives of our children depend on it. If not, the list of those needlessly gone too soon will only grow, as it has over the last decade since Newtown.

No child deserves this.
No parent deserves this.
No person deserves this.

And no citizen, policymaker, or community can stand by and do nothing to prevent it from happening again. We need to make sure all children have access to the mental health care they need, so this devastating chapter of American history won’t be repeated for generations.

If you’re struggling today to find the words to explain these events to your kids, here is a great resource from PBS Kids that can help. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network also offers a lot of very helpful information in both Spanish and English. Or you can watch this recorded FSRI discussion with FSRI’s Kayla David about what parents can do in the wake of a mass shooting.

And as always, if you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, please reach out to FSRI’s caring staff at (401) 519-2280 for assistance.

Let’s get to work.

Margaret Holland McDuff

MA, MBA, CEO

Family Service of Rhode Island

That’s exactly what happened to Allie and her partner Kyle a few years ago. The stress of realizing she was pregnant despite her IUD was enough to kick her into early labor. And with just a matter of days to process the idea of becoming parents and prepare their home, she gave birth to Willow at Women and Infants Hospital at just 8 months along.

“When I had my daughter, it was actually very unexpected because all I’d noticed was weight gain. But Portuguese families are very good when you’re in a crisis,” she joked. “They made a room for the baby in three days so she could come home.”

Luckily before coming home, a hospital social worker had recommended they contact the First Connections program for additional support.

“We needed help,” she said. “We needed someone to tell us how to be parents.”

Though FSRI’s First Connections program is referred to about 5,000 moms like Allie after birth each year whose babies face one of a list of 13 at-risk categories– some as simple as being a first-time mom. Not all mothers follow through on the offer or make an appointment to receive free support services that First Connections provides. But when Allie heard about it, she was immediately willing to accept any and all help she could get during the huge life shift she was going through.

“Motherhood hit me hard,” she said. “I didn’t want to fail. This program is good at letting you know that no one is ready for parenthood—everyone learns as they go. No parent is perfect and you can always ask for help.”

The confidence and trust she built having First Connections nurses visit her and Willow at home helped to ease her into this new, unexpected role, and all the new worries it came with.

“They come to your home, they’re very respectful about contact. They bring a scale to weigh the baby,” she said. “If you’re a breastfeeding mom like I was, Deb was very informative with tips and tricks to help. She and Swannie had lots of resources and walked me through it on the computer. I was also able to sign up for WIC effortlessly with their help.”

Because of the support she received from First Connections over the course of the next year, Allie and her family are now thriving.

“I still stay in touch with [First Connections] staff to this day,” she said.

As for Willow, she just turned 2 and she’d doing great.

“She’s so smart and now her obsession is with animals, especially giraffes,” she said. “She’s getting really into verbal communicating.”

Moms and babies like Allie and Willow are able to receive this level of newborn support through First Connections at no cost to them, but the state reimburses First Connections staff at just $14 per hour, well below the current average hourly wage of $20. The reimbursement rate hasn’t been raised in 22 years. (Read more about the nonprofit workforce crisis in the Boston Globe here.)

Since the pandemic, staff are facing crushing caseloads of 300+ per person and working up to 60 hours a week, even going into homes at the height of the pandemic in full PPE to weigh babies.

“People need [First Connections] now more than ever,” Allie said. “Aside from that, every mother has a unique situation and not everyone has a family to be there for you when you go through this. These people and this [First Connections] program became like my family. I love them and send them updates about the baby all the time.”

Please join us in asking the Rhode Island legislature to raise the reimbursement rate for these vital support staff serving moms and babies when they need it most so that our social service providers don’t have to leave this important caregiving role to make a living.

A Change.org petition has been set up to deliver a message to the legislature on behalf of all nonprofit human service providers.