• 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.

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.

Swanette has always known that she wanted to work in the human service field helping others. She remembers as a young child translating for family members at doctor’s appointments and out in the community and thinking it wasn’t fair there weren’t more Spanish-speaking providers. Swanette is also fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), which she learned at the age of 5. She has taken her language skills and passion for helping others to shape her career. Before coming to First Connections, Swanette worked in both home-based and residential programs. This included briefly working in FSRI’s residential program at Farnum House in 2014 before getting an opportunity to work with Deaf youth at Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts.

Swanette is passionate about the First Connections program, the families she works with (especially the babies!), and her co-workers. One of her favorite parts of the job is building relationships and bonds with the families (and of course, playing with the babies!); many families stay in touch after services and continue to send pictures of their growing children. Swanette’s idea of a good day is when she is able to make contact with a family, form a connection, and help them in any way they need. The job has its many challenges though, especially over the past two years of the pandemic. Referrals to the program have skyrocketed and become more complex; whereas Swanette used to have had 4-5 visits per day pre-COVID, she now often has 8 or 9 per day. “You can never get bored working in First Connections!” she stated, and thinks constantly being flexible is key to the job. There are plenty of tough cases and visits, but Swanette leans on her co-workers, who she reflects are the best group she has ever worked with!

Swanette’s commitment to promoting equity in her professional life is just one of the reasons she was nominated for, and awarded FSRI’s 2022 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award. Outside of FSRI, she is a dedicated and active member of the community. She volunteered for years with Providence Promise, an organization working to support Providence students in pursuing higher education, and has joined many virtual community groups during the pandemic to help lend a hand wherever needed.

Swanette stated she is honored to be recognized by the FSRI community in this way, and reflected the award means that much more since it is coming from those with whom she works, “an amazing group of people.”

Congrats Swanette and thank you for all you do for FSRI and our communities every day!

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.