By Molly Franzonello
Our FACTS team is dedicated to educating medical professionals, students and the broader community about fertility and family-planning approaches that our patients can use to grow their families in a natural, holistic way.
We teach physicians and clinicians how to better care for couples desiring to have a baby, mothers recovering postpartum, couples navigating infertility, and families trying to flourish.
But supporting families cannot stop at the patients we serve. It must also extend to the people carrying out this mission.
For years, FACTS operated as a small collaborative project of the Family Medicine Education Consortium (FMEC) with minimal funding and no paid employees. As the organization grew and became its own nonprofit in 2022, so did the desire to build a workplace culture where family life is not treated as an obstacle to meaningful work.
“Family comes first,” said Dr. Marguerite Duane, founder and executive director of FACTS and the mother of four young children herself. “Our work matters deeply, but ultimately, I want the people who work for our organization to know they are supported in their personal lives as well as their professional roles.”
A Culture Rooted in Family
That belief shapes the culture of FACTS every day. Children occasionally appear in meetings. Parents step away for child pickups, prenatal appointments, ultrasounds, and for anything else where mom or dad is needed. Colleagues cover for one another during difficult seasons, and there is grace for the realities of family life.
As Director of Development, Tucker Brown shared, “From Dr. Duane down, it’s understood that family needs to take precedence.”
For Brown, that flexibility has meant attending prenatal appointments with his wife, caring for his daughter when she is sick, and planning to be present during the exhausting and beautiful early weeks of parenthood.
The Reality Facing New Parents
But flexibility alone cannot solve one of the greatest burdens facing young families today. The United States remains one of the only industrialized nations without federally mandated paid parental leave. While some employees qualify for unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), many families simply cannot afford to go weeks or months without income. For many parents, the postpartum period becomes a challenging balancing act between financial stability and caring for a newborn.
Brown experienced that reality personally before joining FACTS.
“I saved up PTO for months before the birth of my daughter,” he shared. “Then I used all of it during those first couple weeks after she was born. After that, there wasn’t much flexibility left.”
For many young families, unpaid leave is not an option.
“It becomes a choice between being present with your family and being paid,” Brown said.
Building Something Better
At FACTS, leadership wants to build something better. Currently, FACTS offers a few weeks of paid parental leave for qualifying employees. Now, through a special fundraising campaign from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day, FACTS hopes to expand that support significantly.
Thanks to a generous $30,000 matching pledge from one of our faithful benefactors, every donation made during the campaign will be doubled and directly support expanded paid parental leave for qualifying FACTS employees. Dr. Duane’s vision is to triple paid leave for mothers and double it for fathers.
“As a fertility organization, we really want to model the idea that parents should be supported after the birth or adoption of a baby,” Dr. Duane explained.
That support matters deeply for families welcoming children through every path to parenthood.
Why Paid Leave Matters
For Natalia Rodriguez, Director of Education at FACTS and mother of two, the need for expanded leave became especially clear after recovering from a Cesarean birth.
“I love FACTS, and I love the work I do,” Rodriguez shared.
Rodriguez, originally from Colombia, described her shock upon realizing there is no federally guaranteed paid maternity leave in the United States. In Colombia, paid maternity leave is 16 weeks.
“The difference in mental health, physical recovery, and family well-being is huge when mothers have more time to recover and bond with their babies,” Rodriguez said.
She also emphasized something many organizations overlook: supporting parents well is not only good for families, but also good for workplaces. “When parents have time to recover and be fully present with their children, they return healthier, more focused, and more committed,” she added.
For Paula Gallagher, Executive Assistant and Marketing & Events Coordinator at FACTS, parental leave carries another dimension entirely.
Gallagher and her husband are currently in the process of adoption.
“With adoption, we could be out of state for weeks,” Gallagher said. “There are travel demands, legal paperwork, possible NICU stays, and then the transition of bringing an infant home.”
She shared that even the current paid leave policy has already brought significant peace of mind. “It took so much time, effort, and sacrifice to finally become parents,” she said. “I want to be fully present for that experience.”
Her words echo a reality many parents understand deeply: You cannot fully recover, bond, and care for a child while simultaneously worrying about losing income. And yet many families are forced to do exactly that.
A Chance to Support Families
At FACTS, we believe families deserve better. We believe mothers deserve time to recover. We believe fathers should be present during the earliest days of their children’s lives. We believe adoptive families deserve support during transitions that are often emotionally, financially, and logistically overwhelming. And we believe organizations dedicated to supporting women and families should strive to model those values internally.
As a nonprofit organization, FACTS relies on donor support to make that vision possible.
This Mother’s Day season, we invite you to partner with us. Your donation will directly support expanded paid parental leave for qualifying FACTS employees and help create a workplace culture where families do not have to choose between financial stability and caring for their children.
Every contribution made between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day will also be matched dollar-for-dollar through the generous $30,000 matching pledge.
At FACTS, supporting families is not separate from the mission. It is the mission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Molly Franzonello, CNM, DNP, MHA, is a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) and Blog Editor at FACTS. Her clinical and editorial work focuses on fertility awareness, restorative reproductive medicine, and women’s health. Through these roles, she is committed to advancing patient-centered, evidence-based care, exploring systems and models that support this work, and expanding education on women’s fertility and health.
