Moms Connect Dubuque Co-Founders: Gina Martin (left) and Kristina Heinzen (right)
A few years ago, Gina Martin showed someone a picture on her phone. It was a baby photo of one of her kids, sent to her by her kids’ mom.
The person looked at it and asked, “Why is she sending you these?”
And Gina said the thing I have not been able to shake since we stopped recording: “Well, I am who she has.”
Sit with that one for a second. A mom whose children were now living in someone else’s home was sending baby pictures to the foster mom…because there was nobody else to swoon over them with. No mom to call. No best friend to text. Just the woman now raising her kids.
That sentence is pretty much the whole reason Moms Connect Dubuque exists. On this week’s episode of The Found Podcast, I sat down with Gina and her co-founder, Kristina Heinzen, and I’ll warn you now: we went deep quick.
The Classes That Were Supposed to Prepare Them
Kristina and Gina met in 2019, sitting in the same foster parent licensing classes. Kristina had felt called to foster for years. She’d cried over it. She believed she was going to help kids in really sad situations. Gina and her husband had decided to foster before they ever had biological children, because they had a home, spare rooms, stable families, and plenty of love to give.
Here’s what Gina remembers saying in those classes: “We can show these kids what a loving family looks like.”
And here’s what today’s Gina would like to do to 2019 Gina: punch her. Her words, not mine. (Though I have a 2017 Molly I’d like to have a word with, so I felt that one in my bones.)
Because what both of them learned, slowly and then all at once, is that these biological parents love their kids. Deeply. And through circumstances in and out of their control, and often generations of trauma and instability, they simply haven’t been equipped to provide what the system defines as safety and health.
Too Late
For Kristina, the unraveling came in the form of two little boys who came through her home more than once over the years. After visits with their mom, they’d come back and punch and kick, because at the end of the day, they wanted to be with her. Kristina realized she wasn’t helping that family heal. She was adding another layer of trauma to kids who already carried plenty.
For Gina, it was a baby. She was that little girl’s third placement, and she was about to become her fourth. Gina had just gotten the call that a long-term home was ready, and she stood there holding this baby and said out loud, “I am too late.”
Too late to prevent the separation. Too late to prevent the hurt. Whatever help she had to offer was arriving after the damage was already done. She called it the final nail in the coffin. They couldn’t keep doing it the way they’d been doing it.
She Was Those Little Boys
Kristina started building a relationship with the mom of the boys in her care, and the more she listened, the more everything she thought she believed fell apart.
This mom was wise. Smart. Trying so hard. And she had been in foster care herself. Ten years before her own boys were removed from her home, she was one of those little boys, removed from her own mom. Which means, as Kristina put it, we haven’t come any farther. We keep supporting the kids and forgetting that the kids grow up into the parents.
Kristina said something in this part of our conversation that I wrote down in capital letters: When your choices are only impossible, you can’t sit on a throne of judgment. You can only recognize that someone is doing the best they can with the tools they have. And yes, that might not look like how you would do it…but who says you’re the gold standard?
Oof. Right?
Ask the People. Then Actually Listen.
In May of 2023, Kristina and Gina sat down with two moms who had experienced termination of their parental rights, and they asked a simple question: “What would have made a difference for you? What does Dubuque not have?”
Then they listened. And what they heard wasn’t “more programs.” It was relationships. Moms who had gotten clean and lost every friend they had because those friends weren’t safe to be around anymore. Moms who grew up in foster care themselves, so their own parents weren’t safe either. Moms who needed someone steady. Someone who wouldn’t drop them when a time limit expired. Someone who would let them make their own decisions, good or bad, and keep showing up anyway.
I keep coming back to this piece because it applies so far beyond foster care. How often do we (me included, especially when we’re trying to do good) see a problem and sprint straight to the solution we’ve already decided on? We skip the step of asking the people we want to serve what would actually matter to them. Kristina and Gina didn’t skip it. They built Moms Connect with those moms, not for them, and they still do.
Help Shouldn’t Feel Like a Transaction
Here’s something Dubuque has plenty of: resources. Lots of organizations doing good work at the moment of crisis. But the moms kept describing the same exhausting loop. Go here, tell your story, get the thing. Go there, tell your story again, get the next thing. Prove you deserve it, over and over.
So Moms Connect built relationships with those agencies too. Instead of handing a mom a phone number and wishing her luck, Gina can say, “I know Suzy at this organization. She’s so kind. She gets it. I’m going to email her and loop you in.” It’s the same thing any of us do when a friend needs a hairdresser. You don’t hand them the phone book. You say, “Oh, I love my girl, let me put you in touch.”
Gina pointed out that as a middle-class woman with tons of support, she doesn’t love making cold calls for things she needs either. Now imagine making those calls in survival mode, hearing “no” constantly, while trying to figure out rent, rides, childcare, and a job, with your family on the line. Of course people shut down.
Bringing Everyone to the Same Table
Twice a month, Moms Connect hosts gatherings. Moms drop their kids off in childcare run by volunteers. They make a plate of food (donors have covered the meals for well over a year). They browse donated clothes, shoes, and toilet paper to take home. And then they sit down together and eat.
There’s a volunteer with a party bus who drives around Dubuque picking up moms who need a ride and dropping them back off at night. There’s a new curriculum written by one of their board members about recognizing the survival responses that have kept these moms going, and learning to interrupt them when it’s time to respond differently.
I said it on the episode and I’ll say it again here: with all the privilege I have, some nights I don’t want to leave my house after 7:00. So when I hear about a community noticing every single barrier standing between a mom and a room full of support, and then quietly removing them one by one? That’s the whole thing.
And it matters more than it might look. Kristina walked me through the research: healthy relationships improve mental health, and better mental health changes how you parent and the choices you make. But when you’re living in crisis, relationships fall to the bottom of the priority list. Isolation doesn’t always mean being physically alone, either. As Kristina put it, you can be alone and still be surrounded by people.
Building the Next Rung
Moms Connect talks a lot about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Meeting the basics (food, shelter, clothes) matters. But the goal is to help moms climb.
Which is why the next need that bubbled up from the moms was employment. One mom had a second shift job offer and childcare assistance lined up…for first shift childcare. On paper, the problem was solved. In real life, it wasn’t even close.
So this fall, Moms Connect is launching a cleaning business. The goal isn’t to have moms cleaning houses for twenty years. The goal is a launching point: a job to put on a resume, a reference for the next application, and help figuring out childcare and transportation along the way. It comes with an education track, too, with moms reimbursed for their time in classes through partners like NICC and Iowa Works. Because, as Gina put it, moms can’t just stop working to get an education. That’s a privilege.
From Tacos to a 501(c)(3)
None of this was the plan. Kristina said they could literally pull up their old texts: “Let’s meet with some moms. Let’s have tacos.” That was it. That was the whole strategy.
Then doors kept opening, and walking through them was the next logical step. Today Moms Connect Dubuque is a 501(c)(3) with a board, community partners, and the two of them serving as co-executive directors.
Kristina called it the most humbling thing she’s ever done. She knows growth toward stability often looks like five steps forward and ten steps back. And her promise to the moms is this: when you take those ten steps back, I’m still going to be there with you.
How many of us have people in our lives who stick around for the really, really bad? Most of us have to get our ducks in a row before anyone will walk alongside us. Moms Connect is trying to flip that.
Measuring What Actually Matters
After we stopped recording, we kept talking (as one does), and we got into impact. How do you measure something relational and generational when the world wants clean numbers by the end of a grant cycle?
Kristina shared what they’ve tracked informally so far. They know of 17 moms who have closed their child welfare cases and not had them reopened, compared to roughly 85 cases in Dubuque over the past year or so that were reopened within a year of closing. And none of their active Moms Connect moms have experienced termination of parental rights.
Those are big numbers. But the real results will show up in the next generation, and you can’t measure that in six months. If we care about roots and relationships, we might have to get a little more open-minded about what success looks like and how long it takes to see it.
Find Moms Connect Dubuque
You can learn more and reach out at momsconnectdbq.org (the contact form goes straight to both Kristina and Gina, and yes, “I don’t know what I want to do, but I want to help” is a perfectly good message to send). Follow Moms Connect Dubuque on Facebook for gathering updates and details on their second annual Dignified Christmas Market this December at the NICC Business Center, where parents get to shop for brand-new gifts and choose their kids’ presents with dignity. They’ll need gift drive hosts, donations, and volunteers for setup and the big day.
And then tell me: whose story haven’t you asked for yet? Who have you already decided you understand? Maybe that’s the table to pull up a chair to this week.
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