Blog
Improving Care for Foster Infants: The SNOO Project
by Holly Gruber
Months ago at a meeting of emergency foster parents I was attending, one foster mother said she was struggling with the care of her fentanyl-exposed baby. He fussed constantly and wouldn’t sleep. She said that when she’d first picked him up from the hospital, he’d been in a SNOO bassinet. SNOOs are high tech “smart bassinets” that swaddle babies and respond to their cries to comfort them. I know some girlfriends who’ve used them with their healthy babies for sleep training. A few of of the foster moms at the meeting noted that they’d been seeing these SNOOs in NICUs of some of our local hospitals, where they were being utilized to soothe drug-exposed newborns. Wait, I thought: they’re using these in Neonatal Intensive Care Units? For these same babies that we are caring for in our homes, as they continue to go through drug withdrawals? The foster mother who’d begun the conversation wondered: didn’t it make sense for her to have a SNOO at home so that she could continue its use for this baby?
Acquiring the SNOO bassinets for emergency foster households in my County became the first official project for the Three Starlings Foundation. I won’t bore you with all the details of the steep learning curve that I continue to ascend, but suffice it to say that I reached out to friends. I reached out to family. I sought legal and financial advice. I contacted business associates. I talked to leaders of community organizations, and I applied for grants.
Full disclosure: I am an introvert. I don’t like public speaking or asking for help. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how important this is. These babies often come from extreme poverty. It is estimated that up to 80% of infants in foster care are drug-exposed. Some come from homes in which there has been family violence. Some have never had homes. These are not infants who come from situations where baby showers were thrown to celebrate their arrival. Many arrive having had no prenatal care whatsoever. I know from firsthand experience that resources are thin, and the task is large. The fellow foster parents who are my colleagues are big-hearted people mostly making due on a shoestring. I found my voice, as an advocate for the babies and the foster parents alike. I went to people in the community, and I talked about the need. These people heard me, and they offered to help.
The SNOO project, which is now completed, was a huge success, but our work on behalf of children in foster care and our advocacy for foster parents and struggling birth parents in our community will continue. We now have a platform, and we’ve found that members of our greater community are generous and interested to make a difference.
Our current project is “Bundles of Joy.” The name of the project was inspired by my mother. She was a creative, resourceful person who was able to find joy in almost any situation or—as a last resort—found a way to create the joy herself. The Bundles of Joy project will involve preparing care packets for infants transitioning out of emergency foster homes into more permanent homes. As I noted earlier, babies in foster care often come from homes experiencing poverty. Sadly, their arrival has sometimes been met with ambivalence. We want to support the transition of these children into stable, loving, long-term homes by helping them out with baby care basics. We also want to celebrate the arrival of these babies into their new homes by providing them with keepsakes (such as handmade blankets and photo books) that, going forward, will help them to know that they are treasured and valued.
And, in fact, considering that we ALL (all 15 of the households in our County who handle emergency cases) care for these babies one after the other, month after month, wouldn’t these be a great tool for us to have? These babies cry, tremor, and can be completely dis-regulated. They don’t sleep well. They often have serious medical complications. A few of the moms said they’d been doing research on the SNOOs. Having them could be great. They could help us care for these babies better and might even help us get a little more sleep ourselves in the process.
But foster care stipends aren’t much; the compensation in our County is under 2 dollars per hour. At a cost of $1700.00 per SNOO, we wondered, how could we possibly manage to fund a purchase of SNOOs for the 15 of us in our County who care for these infants?
It started with an email to the company that makes the SNOOs. I asked them about donations. (I found out later that I was not the first of us who had reached out to them to ask.) After a few go arounds with them it became clear to me that I might have some grant opportunities, IF I was affiliated with a nonprofit. Since I was not affiliated with an existing nonprofit, I decided just to found one on my own. How hard could it be, right? I filed the paperwork, and about six weeks later, I was off and running.
I am proud and thrilled to relate that within 6 months, we had raised enough funds for the 15 SNOOs, plus a cushion that would allow us to provide bassinets to newly-enrolling foster families over the course of the year (to date, we have actually been able to provide SNOOs to 17 households). In the process, we have also had the opportunity to educate members of the community about the needs of these children and the day-to-day realities of being a foster parent to a drug-exposed newborn.
We want to give a special shout-out to some of our supporters. The Huntington Beach Elks Club was our first community donor, sponsoring one bassinet. We also had a bassinet sponsored by the Garden Grove Knights of Columbus. We had dozens of generous individual donors. Our largest supporter of this project by far was the Healthcare Foundation for Orange County, who awarded a grant that covered approximately half of the project budget. We have tremendous gratitude to everyone who has helped us to achieve this goal, which has allowed so many hard-working foster parents to be able to do even better on behalf of these newborns.
In the meantime, please enjoy the photos on this page, which are of just a few of the beautiful babies who were able to benefit from the SNOO project. You might also like to know that when I delivered the SNOOs to the foster households, the foster parents were overwhelmed with gratitude. A few of them cried, moved by the generosity of so many and by the fact that their tremendous, ongoing efforts on behalf of these babies had been acknowledged.
And to you, reader, thank you sincerely for taking an interest in what we are trying to accomplish. If you would like to know more about foster parenting or our foundation’s goals, I encourage you to contact us for more information.