Parents Reaching Out’s mission is to provide peer counseling to families facing the challenges of a high-risk pregnancy or a critically ill infant or child.  Parents Reaching Out’s goal is to help parents become better and more effective caregivers so that children receive more intensive and cost effective health care.

Parents Reaching Out, a nonprofit, community-based organization, is the only agency in middle Tennessee which provides peer counseling to mothers experiencing high-risk pregnancies and to parents of premature or critically ill newborns in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and to parents of children in pediatric critical care (PCCU).  Our program is aimed at long-term solutions in the area of preventive health care for both parents and premature infants.

Parents Reaching Out was founded in 1983 by Derenda Hodge, RN, MSN, and Clinical Nurse Specialist Nurse Educator in the NICU at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, because she was interested in finding help and support for families with infants in an NICU.  She also recognized a similar unmet need for women experiencing a high-risk pregnancy, and in 1986, Parents Reaching Out’s Peer Counseling Program was expanded to include support for women experiencing a high-risk pregnancy.  In 2002, support to families of children in the PCCU at Vanderbilt was added.  Since 1983, Parents Reaching Out has served over 29,000 families.