Faith Maternity Care exists to serve women who choose to carry their babies to full-term, by providing a home for expectant mothers, along with community client services for mothers who already have a place to call home. Recently, our moms had positive interactions with both Fulton colleges. Westminster College's Kappa Alpha Theta Fraternity (the first Greek-letter fraternity for women) recently volunteered at Faith Maternity Care. The women dove into a list of household improvement projects including sorting donations in the Baby Boutique and moving furniture between rooms, to create a larger living room space for our mothers to have enough floor space for infant tummy time and for baby swings. Kappa Alpha Theta also organized our kitchen cabinets, assisted with various cleaning tasks, and served a delicious lunch.
Our mothers attended the "Meet Your Future Employer" day at William Woods University. It's a key priority for our mothers to work towards employment and career paths that will allow them realistic income for independent living and all the things their growing baby will need in the years ahead. Three of our mothers who are seeking jobs met with and learned about employers in Callaway County. Fait Maternity Care Resident Assistants were on hand at the event, to help support our moms and babies as they visited the booths and gathered valuable information.
At Faith Maternity, we consider the whole person: her physical needs as well as her body, mind, spirit, and emotional wellbeing. It truly takes a village to help our mothers reach their parenting and life skills goals.
The Fulton WIC team created a nutrition course for our clients, focused on increasing nutrition for pregnancy, breastfeeding, and recovery from birth.
Our local Head Start team meets in our Fulton home with moms to work on prenatal education, as well as infant milestones and parenting topics. These visits are always welcomed, and there is a lot of laughter in the house during the visits!
The Regional Partnership Grant (RPG) serves parents with substance use disorders. RPG Advocates meet with our mothers one-on-one and assist with transportation, personal development skills, court visits, and more.
Getting Ahead is a twelve-week class about the causes and effects of poverty and strategies for getting ahead and breaking the cycle. For mothers experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, coupled with the complications of being without a safe home, this course by the Fulton CMCA was very helpful for our moms. The moms proudly shared their certificates.
This Spring, all of our mothers completed an intense eight-week course, Unraveled Roots, which was aimed at exposing the hidden causes of damaging behaviors. Each mother committed to the hard work of the study, of looking at the spiritual root causes of abandonment, addiction, abuse, and codependency and how these came into her life from childhood and beyond. We are so proud of these women for completing this study and learning how to move forward into a new way of living. Faith Maternity Care assists women who are choosing to become a prepared mother, to take care of herself and her child. It is a lot to unravel, and we believe our moms are 100% worth it! As we have discovered, faith always finds a way.
Contributors: Jennifer Books is the Faith Maternity Care board president, and Shelley Knight is the executive director.