This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide.
Dawneisha Spratley discovered Project NICU right after her baby’s heart stopped. Her daughter, Jasmine, was born two months premature, and Ms. Spratley was in the waiting room at a hospital in Philadelphia while her baby got a lifesaving procedure. There were fliers for different organizations littered around the room, and Ms. Spratley was drawn to Project NICU because it offered peer support, mentorship and therapy — not just for the mothers of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, but also for the rest of the family.
“So many people I tried to talk to just couldn’t understand the guilt and shame part of not being able to carry your child full term,” Ms. Spratley told me. Her daughter was in and out of several hospitals in her first months of life, and Ms. Spratley said that the peer mentor she was paired with helped her to navigate her child’s many diagnoses. She was also able to access steeply discounted online therapy through Project NICU. Those combined resources helped her to get through the hardest parts of early motherhood.
Ms. Spratley’s experience is all too common in the United States. In 2024, over 10 percent of births were premature, before 37 weeks of gestation. According to the March of Dimes, more states saw preterm birth rates worsen in 2024 than improve — which is why the organization gave the country a pathetic D+ grade on the state of preterm births.
There are many long-term health risks associated with preterm birth, and preterm birth complications are the leading cause of death for children under 5 around the world. (While full-term babies may also end up in the NICU and the organization supports them, too, preemies and babies with low birth weight are seven times as likely to be hospitalized in intensive care as full-term babies are.)
Pam Frasco, a Cleveland-based mother of two who has a background in sports communication, started Project NICU after both her sons were born prematurely, one at 30 weeks and the other at 31 weeks. She told me that even though she had a ton of family support, she still felt so alone. She didn’t get to acknowledge or experience the same milestones that her friends with healthy babies got to recognize.
Ms. Frasco wanted to do something to support other NICU parents, and she started out by making care packages for local hospitals with items like hand sanitizer, lotion and journals. She met another mother of a preemie who was a mental health counselor and wanted to start an in-person support group.
They officially started Project NICU as a nonprofit in 2018 and, in addition to continuing to provide care packages to hospitals in northeastern Ohio and the Quad Cities area, the organization provides virtual support groups for parents in all kinds of situations and with many different backgrounds and locations. There are groups for dads, grandparents, L.G.B.T.Q.+ parents, parents of multiples — the list goes on.
Kate Raftovich, whose son was born at 23 weeks and died after 26 days in the NICU in 2021, found peer support through Project NICU’s bereavement group. Now an ambassador for the organization Ms. Raftovich has two other children, one of whom also spent time in the NICU because of respiratory failure.
When Ms. Raftovich was telling me about the gift bags that she helped distribute, she said that they include unscented dish soap for washing bottles, because the smell of hospital soap “is almost like PTSD for some parents, myself included.”
That small detail really encapsulated for me the importance of this project: Only another parent who had lived through a long NICU stay would know that, and would have the sensitivity and grace to try to prevent that harm. Most people don’t dream of spending their baby’s first holiday season in the hospital, and you can make that difficult experience easier for them to bear by donating to Project NICU.
This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide. The author has no direct connection to the organization mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Project NICU Helps Parents Manage a Rough Start to Parenthood appeared first on New York Times.
