For more than three years, Maddie’s Place, Spokane’s neo-natal nursery for drug addicted infants, has cared for babies who are born to mothers with drug addictions. Many children inherit the addictions. They show physical symptoms, including fussiness or irritability. Parts of their bodies may not be fully formed. They may have intellectual disabilities.
Maddie’s Place cares not only for the babies as they go through detox, but also for the parents who work to overcome their addictions. The nursery has survived on grants from Washington state, Spokane city and county and private donations.
Its chief executive, Shaun Cross, says that's not a sustainable funding model. He’s asking the legislature to change the law to allow the state to pay for the nursery’s services, using funding from its Medicaid program. Cross recently made his case to a Washington state Senate committee.
"We provided free medical services to 171 infants suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome. We've also provided free treatment and wraparound services to 170 of their parents, including free room and board to 95 of those parents...Of the parents who have stayed at Maddie's Place full time with their infants, a remarkable 88% are in recovery today in custody of that infant and housed," he said.
The bill to benefit Maddie’s Place is sponsored by Spokane state senators at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, Democrat Marcus Riccelli and Republican Leonard Christian. But the most powerful testimonials at the committee hearing came from parents whose infants were treated at Maddie's, such as David Aga.
"At first, I was skeptical. I thought it would be like every other place, judgmental, cold, and making me feel like a monster, but I couldn't have been more wrong. From the first day we walked in, Maddie's Place treated us like family. Today, we are almost three years clean, housed, have full custody of my older boys, and are truly living our best life. I've never felt this happy, and I owe so much of that to God and to Maddie's Place." he said.
It’s not clear yet whether that bill will become law. But Shaun Cross says, one thing is in not in doubt is the influence Maddie’s Place is having in other communities. Cross told us this week the nursery has done a great job sharing its story via social media.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Shaun Cross: We're now up to 400,000 followers. We have about 240,000 on Facebook and about 80,000 each on Instagram and Tik Tok. I've got some young women that are putting a really good at this and are putting up a ton of content on those three platforms. And we didn't know if we were going to get any funding from this, from the legislature last year, and we were going to have to close down.
So we kind of started to ring the bell last April, just during the last two weeks of the session or 10 days of the session. And we just started getting money from all over hell and God. It was the damnedest thing I've ever seen. I mean, all 50 states, 17 countries, five military bases, a couple hundred thousand. And the thing that was really intriguing to me is that we were getting these comments from all around the world and all around the country, but the main theme was we have to have one of these clinics in our community.
DN: Last fall, Cross and Maddie’s Place sponsored a series of seminars for organizations interested in developing similar organizations in their communities.
SC: The idea was basically to give people the tools, the templates, you want articles bylaws, you want policies and procedures, you want staffing ratios, you want details on our model.
So we found out that there were about 300 that ran the course and very, very talented people around the country with, and there we found 41 clusters in 35 states. And so we sort of ranked them by, okay, there's this many in this state, there's this many in Dallas, there's this many in Melbourne, Florida, whatever. And then we started to talk to them and contact them.
We said, okay, there's a fork in the road. You can either be kind of faith-based with your 501c3, or you can be secular. Do you want to just do this on your own independently? Or would you like to be affiliated with Maddie's Place? Well, a great number are fine being secular and want to be associated with Maddie's Place. So I've started to form all these single member LLCs under subsidiaries. So we have a Maddie's Place Florida LLC. We have a Maddie's Place Vancouver with a large group in Portland LLC. We have a Maddie's Place housing, and we're looking at forming Maddie's Places in Texas and in Oklahoma.
DN: What's the benefit to all these organizations to be affiliated with Maddie's?
SC: Well, the benefit for them is that I've been working on this for nine years. We've got the playbook now, so it'll probably save them five or six years of how to go about this and the difficulties that are there, and then they'll have our model of care, our staffing ratios, our policies and procedures, our brand, and we can oversee these from Spokane. And then it'll spread, you know, our senior leadership can oversee this.
So we're spreading our overhead. And in return for that, we've prepared intercompany agreements between Maddie's Place and the LLCs with the Oregon Group. So we have the template.
They pay us 8% of everything that they raise in Portland or 8% of everything they raise in Florida or Texas. And so I'm going to be going around a lot, raising money in these different places, but then that'll be another funding source for Maddie's Place for the parent. So I'm trying to diversify the revenue, get as many payment streams as we can while I'm a young man, and get as many of these going as I can around the country.
DN: So let's finish with this. I think you've become more comfortable with the fact that your future is a little more solid, stable than it used to be. As you look five years down the road, is this going to be the best practices for taking care of children and families like this?
SC: I think there's a real opportunity for that.
We have a bill that is working its way through Congress right now called the MIRACLE Act that I've been involved with for the last several years. It basically would direct Health and Human Services to do a three-year comprehensive study of the prevalence of what's called neonatal abstinence syndrome, the substance exposure and the effect on infants, and then also the outcomes of the five clinics that we're aware of in the United States. It's already been introduced in the House with three bipartisan co-sponsors and we believe that we'll have bipartisan sponsorship in the Senate. Once we get through the appropriations process on that, we'll be going back to D.C. quite a bit to kind of really push for that.
But the idea there is that once the states get the data on how bad this is, because we're kind of flying the plane blindly right now, the idea is once they see that a third of all live births are substance exposed, we've got that's happening in our hospitals, and once they see this model and become aware of it and what's happening at these clinics, I think that there's a good chance that a lot of the states will amend their state Medicaid plan and also deal with their own version of DCYF to have funding models for this.
And so the bills that have been introduced in Washington state, I think, could provide a template for other states.
