Why Nurse-Family Partnership?

When I first had the idea of doing a bike ride around the Finger Lakes, I didn't think of it as a fundraiser. It was simply that I'd just bought my first new bike in many years (a sweet matte black Specialized Diverge) and I wanted to take it for a spin. Once it occurred to me, though, there was still the matter of deciding where to direct the money. I thought about it quite a bit before deciding, so I thought I'd explain why I eventually chose Nurse-Family Partnership.
My first thought was to do something having to do with either cycling or education, since that's what I report on for the Democrat and Chronicle. There are several cool local bicycling-related organizations, most prominently R Community Bikes. If you haven't heard of them, take a look. They take donated bicycles, tune them up and give them away for free to people in Rochester. They also sell some of the nicer bikes to help fund the enterprise; I bought one a few years ago for basic commuting after my previous bike was stolen.
The idea is to provide reliable transportation for adults, and some fun for kids. They do free repairs and serve a huge demand. Go down Hudson Avenue one Saturday morning when they're doing the giveaway and look at how long the line is to get an idea of the need. They also recently began modifying bikes for people with disabilities, which I wrote about.
There are also a lot of education-related charities, many of which I've written about at one time or another. Most of them are properly speaking charities supporting kids on the periphery of their actual in-school education. There were two ideas that stuck with me: Nurse-Family Partnership and Dreamkeepers, a scholarship program at Monroe Community College that provides a few final dollars to help keep students from dropping out for financial reasons. I've talked to a number of Rochester students who have had to quit college because they couldn't afford a few hundred dollars for books, class fees or food - this program helps with that.
I described Nurse-Family Partnership in my GoFundMe page, but in brief, it connects first-time, low-income mothers (mostly teenagers) with a nurse for the first two years of their child's life, making sure they have the skills and access to resources they need. So it ended up a decision between an intervention early in life or one early in adulthood. I went back and forth before choosing the former, in part because I thought it would inspire more people to donate. I hope that's the case!