Nurses for Newborns
Rohrbach believed that follow-up home care and parent education would make a world of difference in the health and well-being of babies born to poor, young, and often mentally challenged mothers. With the help of her daughter, Robin Kinney, Rohrbach put together a business plan and started writing grant proposals.
With a mission to help prevent infant mortality, child abuse, and neglect, NFNF catches the fragile families that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Skilled nurses visit new mothers and their children for about two years, bringing with them supplies like diapers and baby formula and support in the form of guidance and training on how to care for their children.
Under Rohrbach’s direction, NFNB has expanded from Missouri into Tennessee. Although the average client has a monthly income of just $500 a month and is evicted an average of eight times during the first year of working with NFNF, not one of the 50,000 infants visited by NFNF had a substantiated report of abuse or neglect during the first year of life.
Divine interruption
In the fall of 2007, Rohrbach got two very different pieces of news. First, she learned that she won the Purpose Prize and the $100,000 that went with it. At the time, Rohrbach planned to donate the money to NFNF and, as she puts it, “hang on forever.”
News that there was a tumor in her leg took Rohrbach in a completely different direction. “With the advent of finding that tumor, I realized that I really wanted to make a bigger difference— help more people then just mothers and babies,” she says. “While what I received the Purpose Prize for is very interesting, what I’m doing with it may be more interesting.”
Rohrbach decided to use her prize money to help guide other social entrepreneurs. “I learned so much over my lifetime about how to realize your dreams that I wanted to make as big a difference as I could for as many people as I could,” she says.
Happily, Rohrbach learned that her tumor was not malignant. “But by then,” she says, “I was already totally in love with my new idea.”
Rohrbach’s new idea, Dynamic Change, LLC, is already assisting clients who have the heart and the vision to take on social ills, but need help with the nuts and bolts of getting the job done.
A woman of strong faith, Rohrbach calls the tumor, “a divine interruption of the direction I was going in.” Despite the many challenges of starting something completely new at the age of 65, Rohrbach is undaunted. “You build on small successes and after you do a few things that seemed impossible, you start to think that maybe you can do anything.”