Room to Grow

Room to Grow's innovative program provides parents raising babies in poverty with one-on-one parenting support and essential baby items throughout their children's critical first three years of life.

Parents visit Room to Grow every three months, starting at the mother's third trimester of pregnancy and then throughout the baby's first three years of life. At each visit, our clinicians monitor the baby's developmental progress and help parents navigate the challenges and celebrate the joys of parenting. This includes helping parents understand their child's developmental stages, offering strategies to recognize and respond to their child's many needs, and providing resources and support to help cope with raising a child in typically stressful circumstances. At every visit parents also receive age-appropriate material necessities, allowing them to provide fully for their baby in an immediate and meaningful way.

Room to Grow began with the pioneering idea of combining long term material and parenting support for children in these earliest years. Innovative features of our program include:

Unique Client Relationships—our staff clinicians meet individually with each family every three months for the first three years of the baby's life, enabling a consistent, deep, and trusting relationship to develop with the parents and children who visit Room to Grow.

Strong Client Commitment—every Room to Grow client signs a Client Agreement Form at their first visit outlining their responsibilities (for example, no more than two late appointments and no more than one missed appointment without notice over the course of the three years). In doing so, they become partners in this process towards supporting their children's healthy growth and development.

Client Referral Process—our close and collaborative relationships with the prenatal programs that refer clients make it possible for us to identify the families who will most benefit from our program, leading to consistently high retention rates. See our list of prenatal partners in New York and Boston.

Warm and Welcoming Meeting Spaces—our client meeting spaces are bright, warm, and inviting - far from the cold, impersonal environments some of our clients face when accessing other forms of social services. Our spaces have been constructed so that we can display our baby items in an organized, thoughtful, and visually pleasing manner on solid maple shelves and hanging racks similar to those seen in upscale children's boutiques. Room to Grow provides dignified and positive spaces for our families to return to every three months. Take a tour of our New York or Boston site.

Concrete Help—at each visit, parents leave with material items that they can immediately use to enrich their children's lives, including clothing, books, toys, bedding, strollers, highchairs, and other baby essentials. Offering these items directly and with careful attention and support enhances their significance and impact on the children's lives.

Quality of Baby Essentials—we accept only the best for our clients-the best clothing, toys, books, and equipment, and the best information and support we can provide. For families who are so often asked to accept the cast-offs of others, we encourage them to believe that their families deserve and have a right to the best of what life has to offer.

Opportunity for Community Participation—we seek out and encourage donations of new and nearly new baby items from parents in the communities where we operate, and provide a tangible opportunity for parents with plenty to directly help parents with less. Often, parents who have so much for their own children feel the impulse to support other families in need during these earliest years and to recycle what is still in wonderful condition.