Relationship Matters tv – Dr. Shelley Amuh, Founder of “The Puddle Project”

The Puddle Project provides pregnant teens and their partners with life skills and parenting techniques through our mentorship program. Each member is paired with a personal mentor. The project supports and guides teens through parenthood as well as their academic and professional careers. Additionally, the Puddle Project provides teens with resources and information on their health, education, childcare, and employment.

Transcript

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are in the world. It’s Dr. Janice Fortman with Relationship Matters TV and Courageous Leadership Academy. You want to better your life, you want to be all you can be, you’ve got to go to CourageousLeadershipAcademy.com. Now look, first of all, before I want to start the show, I really want us all to pray if you pray for the people who have been inundated with the effects of the hurricane. I have friends who live in Florida in Orlando and in Tampa and I have checked on them, so if you have friends, relatives, check on them to make sure that they’re all right. Fortunately, the friends that I know are doing fine, so pray for them. I know that there have been some fatalities and all, but just to know that they have your support and your prayers. So without further ado, I’m going to bring a guest up for you, a special guest, and this is something that I have been reading about and researching about and it’s all about teenage pregnancy. It’s all about the Puddle Project.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Thank you.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
I am going to bring to you Dr. Shelley Emma. I hope I’m pronouncing her name right. She is the founder and CEO of the Puddle Project where she and her organization are dedicated to ensuring pregnant and parenting teenagers have the tools they need to be successful parents. She brings over 30 years of experience as a practicing OB-GYN and she wears her passion for health equity and medicine. She puts that all together. She’s committed her time to improving access to quality health care for low-income communities and communities of color. Now during the pandemic, she in collaboration with 10 other base physicians formed a collaborative and worked to address the gaps in health care access for pregnant women and infants of color. A lot of that had been exacerbated by recent closures of Chicago medical facilities during the pandemic. It’s something that we kind of discussed before we came on, but what I want to do right now is bring to you Dr. Shelley. Let me find you. Where are you? And we talked about the internet and computers. Okay, let me bring her on.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Hi.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Hi. So I’m like we just talked about this beforehand how we can be working on your computer all day long and then when you really need it, it acts up. But anyway, welcome.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Thank you.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Welcome. It’s an honor really to have you on this show tonight. It really is. But you know what I want to ask you first? Why did you become a doctor?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, I had an experience, believe it or not, at age 10 in a local Chicago hospital, St. Bernard’s, where my pediatrician was on staff. I was having stomach pains as a kid and they didn’t know why, so he decided to bring me into St. Bernard’s for a battery of tests. It just absolutely fascinated me. You know, you drink this, you watch that go down your esophagus into your stomach, and it was just so inspiring. I decided at that moment I wanted to be a doctor and I never swayed.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wow. So while we gaining, well originally my, I wanted to be a pediatrician. That was my first love. But during medical school, you have to do rotations in every specialty. When I did pediatrics, I was just heartbroken by sick children, so I decided okay, that’s not gonna work. Then my next love was surgery and I said well that takes a little longer, and so OB-GYN gave me the best of both worlds. I could take care of women and I could still do surgery, so that’s why I kind of fell into OB-GYN. So what’s it like delivering babies?

Dr. Shelley Emma
It’s a blessing. It’s a new experience every time. Every mom is different, the way they deal with pain or the circumstances. Every time is different. You have to have respect for every woman that decides to have a baby and then follows through with all her prenatal care and all the way to delivery. Every time it’s just something special. It’s always special to see a different little child come out and cry.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wow. Well, I had a C-section.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, they still come out and cry with a C-section.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Right. And after the C-section, I said I’m never having another baby. They said that that was the first thing I said when I came out. Never. And I never did, just having one son. Okay, well, so now you transition that into focusing on teenage pregnancy. When did you decide that that was going to be your focus?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, throughout my career when I first started, I was in a group practice then a private practice. I’ve always had teen moms in my office and they were always very special because they needed additional resources. They also needed sometimes you to just be a parent to them, and so I fell into that role quite easily. And so there’s always been a special place in my heart. As I transitioned into more of a hospital-based practice, I didn’t have as much office time with teens. I started doing career fairs and encouraging students to be medical professionals. I always got teen moms that came up to me and would whisper, “I’m pregnant, what should I do?” And I’m in a high school setting, so this happened so many times. I said, “Well, let me think, let me talk to the administration about what resources they have,” and for the most part, none. So if you got pregnant in high school and then you needed something simple as an extra set of books so you wouldn’t have to be in your 30 weeks pregnant carrying a heavy backpack, and believe me, nobody even thought about it. It’s just a simple fix that nobody even thought about. So that’s when I decided to work in my local high school near my home and then I expanded to other high schools.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so you were doing career fairs and so I guess like you said, the girls would come up to you and whisper that they were pregnant. So did you start, I would say, mentoring them also?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yes, I did.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so a one-on-one, you had a special program in the hospital or?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, I just actually talked. Well, I always thought in the back of my mind I wanted to have an organization to help pregnant teens, but with my own family life and my busy career, I just felt like I didn’t have time to do that. So I just talked to the administration at the local hospital, not the local hospital, sorry, the local school where I was doing a career day. I said, “Oh, you have a need, I’d like to provide that service,” and they allowed me to do it. I had to do some things, a background check, various things so I could be an official volunteer in the school, and that’s the way I started even before the Puddle Project was a real organization. It was just me doing the work.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, and so you were doing the work and you felt that you wanted to have, well, start like an organization. So when did you start the Puddle Project and why did you name it the Puddle Project?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, that’s the number one question. Initially, I named it Nation Builders, and Nation Builders, the saying goes, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” It’s an African proverb. I thought it was just so profound because it’s true. Women nurture families, so when you educate women, they encourage their families to be educated. I think it’s just a phenomenal way to think about what women do. Initially, I wanted to register my business as the Nation Builders, however, that’s a big insurance company and I would have gotten into legal trouble, so I had to think of something else. My maiden name is Poole, P-O-O-L-E, and my nickname in medical school was Puddle. One day after I was just going through different names that we could use, my daughter in her wisdom said, “Mom, why don’t you just name it the Puddle Project?” Oh, that’s really cute. I think I will. When you think about it, we’re taking these women who are small puddles and we’re raising them up into a larger body of water, and so I think it’s really kind of cool.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh wow, I love that. You know what I’m going to ask you next? Why was your nickname Puddle?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Because my last name was Poole, Dr. Puddle instead of Dr. Poole.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, okay. So now let me ask you this. Does a teen’s race and ethnicity affect the number of teenage girls who get pregnant?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, I mean, it’s not a race issue. Of course, I work in mainly communities of color, so most of the women that I service are women of color, but it’s actually a problem or not a problem, but it is a statistical thing throughout the nation and not just women of color. Obviously, some women of color are in areas where the access to health care resources are less than other places, so those are the things that we have to address in our community.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, all right. So are you talking about access, but what I want to get to really is why teenage girls get pregnant and what contributes to them getting pregnant. Does their home life or, you know, does that have anything to do with it?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, I would say no. There’s a multitude, you know, as you know, young adolescents experiment with sexual activity, and oftentimes they don’t have the resources or the knowledge to know that just because it’s your first time having a sexual encounter doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant. So I think a lot of it is just lack of education, and oftentimes in families, we don’t discuss those things with our young men and young women. I think they both need to be educated as to how they should behave and what should they do if they choose to have sexual relationships. But for the most part, I think a lot of it is just really a lack of education and resources to find out exactly what they should be doing, and the fact that as parents, sometimes we don’t talk to our young folks about that and we should.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of information that they’re receiving, if they’re not receiving it from a responsible adult, is from their friends who don’t always have all the information either.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Right, right, right.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So do you advocate, I’ll call it sex education, in schools?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Absolutely. I think there’s a place for all education in school and sexual education should be a part of it, and that’s what they should talk about during the health classes that students have. But I think it’s even more important for health care professionals to talk to students. Pediatricians should be talking to adolescents. They should be asking those hard questions, you know, are you interested in sex? Are you allowing folks to touch you? What do you think about that? Do you think you can get pregnant? I think it starts in the medical professional’s office, maybe a pediatrician or family practitioners that are seeing adolescents, and that’s the place where the education should start. Then you can also include families and parents in some of those discussions as needed, and I think that that’s probably a safer place to do it as opposed, you know, because the information you’re going to be able to give in school is limited, and of course, it’s going to be around the curriculum that the school system sets up. But in a physician’s office or in your home, you can take those conversations to another level.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yeah, yeah, that’s very, very true. So do you run across teenage girls that knew that if they had sex that it was the likelihood that they may get pregnant, but they wanted to?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s also some of the social issues that we have to deal with. Sometimes the home life is not an optimal place and they feel like they wanted someone or something to love, and they don’t understand that having a child to love is a little different because you now have someone that you’re responsible for feeding, clothing, housing, and raising, which is a tremendous responsibility and very difficult when you’re not in the right setting and you don’t have the right resources. So, you know, as I talk to some of the teen moms, yes, they oftentimes wanted this pregnancy but had no idea the responsibility that went with it.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Right, because I’ve heard some of them say, well, you know, they think that it’s like a doll, so to speak, but you tell them no, they grow up.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, and you know, they’re not always going to be that cute baby, you know, that you can treat like a little doll you can dress and all, but they grow up and then, like you say, there’s a lot of responsibility that they really don’t know. I mean, you know, afterwards, you know. So a question came in on my text here. It says, with Roe versus Wade being front and center in our society, what percentage would you say of your teenage clients contemplate abortions? Do they come to you, so I guess it’s when they do come to you, do they come to you in other words at the beginning of their pregnancy, do they ask you questions about that?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, we, I often get those questions. The Puddle Project really is an organization that helps once the teen has already decided to have the baby, so we’re not having discussions about abortion with those students because they’ve already decided they want to have the baby or they’re already parenting, so we’re providing the resource to make sure that that’s successful. If in my, I’m in the hospital setting, when I have to have those conversations, if I’m not that student or mother’s provider, I always say go back to your provider and have those conversations. Talk to your parents, talk to your partner, you know, the father of this pregnancy, and have those conversations with them. Roe versus Wade will definitely impact that because it’s going to limit resources in our community for deciding for yourself whether or not you want to maintain this pregnancy or terminate the pregnancy. I am just an advocate of choice. I think women should have the choice. I don’t think there should be any legislation to tell women what to do with their bodies, but I do not make decisions for anybody. I give them all the facts, I give them the pros and cons, and let them know that maybe they need to get a little counseling with a professional prior to making that decision because oftentimes after women do it, they feel guilty, and you need to understand that when you make that decision, there are consequences, but it also can be a joyous thing because you’re doing something that you want to do for your health or for your long-term success in whatever you choose to do.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, all right. So now since you’ve been doing the Puddle Project, is there an increase or do you see an increase or decrease in teenage pregnancy?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Those statistics fluctuate, and they also fluctuate with who’s giving you the statistic. Overall in the United States, the teenage pregnancies are lower than they were say 20 years ago. Of course, in our community, that’s true as well, and it’s true because of the access of birth control. So because birth control is, we have more access to birth control, you see less teenage pregnancies, and I think that’s why it’s so important that we have those resources in our community so that people can have birth control if they want to be sexually active.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, all right. So now once the girls come to you and they decide to be a parent, do you work with, do you have to ever work with their parents, you know, the future grandparent?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yes, well, the Puddle Project has to adhere to some of the Chicago Public Schools or any school district that we’re in, their guidelines. So you cannot work as a volunteer with a minor without permission from the parents. So we have a permission slip that we do send to the parents, and if they are not willing to sign the permission slip to have a mentorship for their child, we cannot legally do it. But most of the times, parents are more than welcome to have somebody help them with their parenting or pregnant teen, you know, and it’s true that it takes a village to help raise a child, and so we don’t have too many parents that say, “Oh no, we don’t want your services,” because with our services comes a lot of resources, both financial, emotional, and resources to help them complete high school as well as to go on to college or any other training program they want to do, which is what we encourage. Actually, one of our goals, and we make this clear to our students that we work with, our goal is for you to complete high school, not with a GED, with a diploma, because there’s some things you can’t do with a GED. For example, you can’t, you usually cannot go to a major university with a GED. You have to have a high school diploma. You can’t go to armed services without a high school diploma. So with a GED, you limit what your next steps could be. So we try to impress upon them, and not to mention the fact we want them to get the best education possible, and the best education possible is for you to complete high school as a start, and then we move on from there. So yeah, I have not had one parent that says, “I don’t want you working with my child,” because our services are good. They’re top-notch. It’s one-on-one mentorship. We help them financially monthly. We encourage them to read to their child. We give them a book monthly, so it’s really no reason for anyone to say they don’t want our services.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, I didn’t know that you were connected with the public school system. I thought this was a separate project, a separate organization, you know, so I see now, like you say, you have to adhere to the rules, and yeah, so what’s, so are you a vendor then with a Chicago?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, we’re working on that. We’ve been working with the schools, not just Chicago Public Schools, but the schools in the south suburbs for about six or seven years. Initially, we chose not to be a vendor because we didn’t want to have, I guess, the restrictions that go along with that, but now we recognize that there’s, there are some advantages to doing that, and so we just started working on our application for the Chicago Public Schools vendor.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so I’m a little confused. So you go into the schools to help the girls, but do you have to have permission, you know, like from the Chicago Board of Education to go into the schools?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, to work in any school, there are guidelines. So most schools will expect you to have a background check. They may have their own application process. The Chicago Public Schools process is different from every other school’s process. So obviously in the world, so for me, because we’re in five different high schools, we have to be background checked in every high school. So the Chicago Public School is just one general, I mean, once you’re background checked and approved in Chicago Public Schools, you can go to any high school in the Chicago Public School System, but you still have to have permission from the principal. So it’s still, you just can’t walk into the school and say, “Okay, this is the service I provide.” You have to talk to the administrators there, and even when you’re a vendor in Chicago Public School, you still have to have a relationship with the principal because she could choose not to have you in her school or his school. So there is a process for every school system, and it’s for the safety of the students. And so we decided, even though we’re an organization that we can do work outside of Chicago or outside of any school, where are the pregnant teens? Hopefully, they’re in the schools, and that’s the easiest way to have a relationship with them. And also, the administrators are usually very encouraging in terms of encouraging the students to be a part of our program.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, okay. Well, I have to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want you to elaborate more on your services that you provide to the teenagers.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Okay, sure.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Alright, we will be right back with the Puddle Project after these brief messages. Thank you.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
We’re back. If you would like to have a video promotion or video book trailer, please contact us at Janfornow125@gmail.com. That’s J-A-N, the number four, N-O-W at Gmail.com. We will be happy to provide you a video promo, video commercial, video book trailer of your books and of your services and products. So let’s get back to the Puddle Project.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Alrighty.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Alrighty, so now let’s talk about the services, the exact services that you offer these girls.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Well, our service is a one-on-one mentorship. We have volunteers who mentor each student, and we also have both male and female. So we do have one couple that we’re mentoring now. The young lady finished high school, the young man didn’t, but we’re trying to encourage him to finish. So it’s a one-on-one mentorship, and basically, the services circle around our goals. Our goals are graduation, graduating with a high school diploma, developing healthy family lifestyles for themselves and their child, and becoming responsible parents and working adults. If you think about those goals, everything we do is helping for those goals. If we’re starting with them and they’re pregnant, we also help them with making sure they get prenatal care, proper nutrition, proper rest, etc. If they’re already parenting, then obviously we’re helping them make sure that they keep their babies in good medical health and everything that goes along with that, and giving them all the resources so that they can complete high school successfully. Sometimes, like I said, some of the things that we have to do around the school seem like no-brainers, but the schools don’t do, like I mentioned, having an extra set of books so that they could keep a set of books at home and a set of books in school so they don’t have to be transporting those books back and forth every day, particularly if they’re pregnant. Even if they’re not, some of our moms bring their babies either to school, and on their way to school, they drop their babies at the nursery, and then so they have extra baggage already, so we don’t want them carrying books back and forth. Now that’s not as much as a problem because we’re in the computer age, so a lot of times it’s just computers, but sometimes there’s a book or two that they have to have, and we always ask for a second set, of course.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, we have a question here that came through. Sandy Barney Ennis wants to know how many girls do you mentor during a year?

Dr. Shelley Emma
So that number varies anywhere between 10 to 20 girls since we’ve started. Unfortunately, the pandemic really put a damper on our services, mainly because they weren’t in school, but also once schools went back in session, a lot of our parents or a lot of our students didn’t come back to school, and that’s because a lot of them depend on bus services which weren’t available. So it’s really been a challenge for us now to build back our organization now that schools are back in session, and so hopefully those numbers will continue to go up.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So how long do you work with the girls?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, so we keep them, you know, throughout. Again, we want them to finish high school, so if we start mentoring them in high school, we make sure that they finish that and accomplish that goal, and then we help them move on to college or any training programs that they might want to do. For example, I started mentoring a young woman when she was a junior in high school, that’s when she had her baby, and she has now completed college. She has now started her own business, and she does skincare, and she has her own shop where she does skincare, and now she’s developing a vegan makeup. I’m so proud of her. So that’s just a testament of with just some additional resources, encouragement, and mentoring, you can help young women soar.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh my goodness. So now, is it one-on-one mentoring, or do your mentors mentor more than one pregnancy or what?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, it’s one-on-one because, you know, believe it or not, they need a one-on-one. It’s very difficult to mentor more than one student, and I was doing that initially, which is why I decided that, okay, it’s time to start an organization because you can’t do it. I want the mentors to really develop a relationship. I want the mentees to feel like they have someone they can call when they need to talk, and it’s very difficult to do that with more than one student at a time. Oftentimes, our moms and our students have a lot of things going on at once, so I want them to have the opportunity to have a one-on-one relationship without our mentors feeling like they’re so stressed they can’t give, they really can’t give their all to that student.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so now do they come into a, does your organization have a brick and mortar setup or?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, we do not. I mean, I’m hoping that at some point we could have an emergency shelter because we have had students that have become homeless when they become pregnant, either because they get put out of their home or they choose to live with their significant other, and then that doesn’t work out and they don’t have anywhere to go. So I’m hoping that at some point we can have an emergency shelter for some of our teen moms because most of the shelters that are available are not available for teenagers. They’re available for adults, and so there’s limited shelters for teens, and they’re not very safe for teens as well. So yeah, so that’s really a resource that needs to be provided that we just don’t have a lot of right now.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, all right. How do you choose your mentors?

Dr. Shelley Emma
So for example, for the one school that in the Chicago Public Schools that we’re a part of is called Simpson Academy for Young Women, and right now it’s the only public school for pregnant and parenting teens. There used to be three in the city, one on the South Side, one on the West Side, and this school, which is kind of near West, is near the downtown area. It’s on 13th and Paulina. So that school, all the students are parenting or pregnant women, so it’s a natural place for us because that’s who we want to mentor. So we present our services to those students every year, and that’s where most of our mentees come from. Of course, they can choose to be a part of our program and not be a part of our program, and the beauty of that school is they have other organizations that partner with that school, so sometimes a student has a different need and they’ll choose to go to an organization that provides whatever that need is for them.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So your mentors, do they have to have any specific qualifications? How do you vet them?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Okay, so of course we have a conversation with them about what our expectations are for them, for the students, and that’s the main vetting process. They have to be willing to do at least one hour a month with their mentees, and most of the time they do far more. Most of the time they come and participate in activities that are happening at the school. So it’s really someone that’s willing to give their time and also their resources and energy to help a young woman to succeed. And that’s not a small responsibility because it takes time. It takes time away from maybe their own family responsibilities, and also most of our mentors are still working women, so they also have their careers that they’re taking care of at the same time. So once you start talking about what their responsibilities are and what we need from them, they really self-select themselves one way or the other. And then after that, if they do decide to mentor, they really become very committed and they do things far beyond what our expectations are.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh, okay. So when you say that normally, I guess before COVID, you would have maybe 20 girls, so you would have 20 mentors?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Correct.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh, okay. Alrighty. So do you ever, it’s probably a silly question, I don’t really, but do men ever want to, would you ever want men to be mentors?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, well, so now we do have a couple.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
You have?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yeah, I do have a couple that we mentor. So we have four or five men that have been background checked and are ready to mentor, but it’s very difficult to get the men to be, to the fathers of the babies to come alongside. So what our next goal would be would be to partner with a men’s organization that are already mentoring young men because most of our girls or most of our students come from Simpson Academy, which is only a school for girls, so the men are not there and the father of the babies are not there. And because we’re background checked and the safety of our mentors have to be kept in mind as well, we do all our mentoring in the school, which keeps the mentee safe and keeps the mentors safe. So we need to do that as well for our male mentors. So I think a better way to operate would be to find an organization that’s already doing that and then let them mentor those men or, you know, a lot of them are still high school students as well. But yeah, you got to look at the safety factor as well.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Right, right, right, right. So, well, you told me your greatest achievement as far as your mentee, but what about others in the Puddle Project? Do you have any amazing, some more amazing stories that have come out where the girls have just really, really succeeded?

Dr. Shelley Emma
Oh yeah, we do. So first of all, all of the graduates from Simpson Academy in 2022, June of 2022, went to college, every single graduate. And that’s in our mentee, one of our mentees was the valedictorian. She gave the speech at the graduation. She is now in college working on a nursing degree. She just got a wonderful opportunity to do some, it’s a job, but it’s more like a shadowing at Rush University. So she’s one of our superstars. She’s a phenomenal parent, and she spoke to that in her graduation speech. I hope to have her, the video of her speech on our website very soon so that everybody can see it. And two of our mentees, if you go to thepuddleproject.org, you can see their videos and they’ll talk about how the Puddle Project helped them to become better parents and continue to succeed in whatever they chose to do. So yeah, we, now there’s some absolutely good work going on that is not publicized. You know, we need to talk about some of our success stories instead of all the horrible things that are happening in our world. And some of these young women are doing some phenomenal things.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wow, wow. And have you been to any weddings?

Dr. Shelley Emma
No, not of our mentees yet. They haven’t, but I’m sure we will. If we continue to mentor women, I’m sure we will.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So now I know you said you tried to get back to where you were before COVID.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Yes.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
And so how do you recruit, how do you get the word out, I should say, to women who want to, you know, to mentor teenage girls who are pregnant, who are parenting?

Dr. Shelley Emma
So, well, one way is to do things like what I’m doing right now. You’ve given me an opportunity to talk about our organization, and we’ve had some sororities that have allowed us to do that. A lot of our mentors are friends of the current mentors, so it’s a lot of word of mouth going on. Oftentimes when we go into school and we mentor, sometimes we’ll get a teacher that says, “Wow, this is something that I would like to do. I’ve heard about your program and I would also like to mentor.” So that’s the main way that we have done it, but obviously we really need to have a broader base so that we can mentor more girls. Our goal would be to mentor every girl at Simpson Academy and also in some of the other South Suburban high schools where we work. We’re at Homewood Flossmoor High School, we’re at the Thornton Township High Schools, that’s Thornridge, Thornton, Thornton Fractional. And so every time we pick up another school, we need more mentors. But my audience think these are all schools in Illinois.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yes, Illinois. So have you thought about the Puddle Project being not only in Illinois but in other states?

Dr. Shelley Emma
I think that’s a tall order right now. I think we have plenty of pregnant and parenting teens right here in this area, and the challenge is finding mentors to mentor those moms and dads. So I think that we have more than enough to do right here in the Chicagoland area, and obviously it would be a great model to take to another state, perhaps finding someone else like me that wants to take on that task, and then we help mentor them to start an organization in their area. I think it would be very difficult for us to try to do something outside of the Chicagoland area right now because remember, you want to be hands-on with these students. During the pandemic, we did do a lot of videoing and talking to people, FaceTiming and Zooms, but you really need to be hands-on, and you need to see people. Oftentimes people put on a very different face on a Zoom call, and then when you see them, you’re like, “Oh, what happened? You look like you’re not taking care of yourself. You look differently on the Zoom, but I can see you’re not really, you know, that there’s some things that you are not taking care of that I need to help you with.” So it’s really important to be able to see people one-on-one.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay.

Dr. Shelley Emma
It would be a challenge to do that if you were doing something in another state if you couldn’t travel there.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, okay. So my last question that came in, it says, and I guess this, I guess it can have to do with what you’re doing now with teenage girls or just in general, it says, what has been one of your most fascinating experiences during your medical career?

Dr. Shelley Emma
I think, yeah, I gotta think about that. Well, when I was in training, I had a patient who had a very, and this has nothing to do with obstetrics, but this was fascinating because of this experience, I was able to write a paper and published it in one of our journals. So this was a lady that had a huge tumor, and we were able to remove the tumor, and the tumor was so large that we had to have a second table next to our operating room table to actually remove the tumor and roll the tumor over to that table. So that was one of my most fascinating operations that then led to me writing a paper with some of the physicians at the same hospital where I was. So I guess that was the most fascinating thing in terms of gynecologic work, but in terms of obstetrics, believe it or not, every time I deliver a baby, it’s fascinating. Every time I can help a mom bring a child into the world safely is fascinating. And I guess that’s part of being an OB-GYN physician. You see that life every time you step into the hospital, and that part is really an amazing gift that God has given me.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh, that’s wonderful. Bless you, bless you, bless you. So now if people, most of my audience are women, and a lot of them are retirees. I’m talking to you all, you know who I’m talking to. And if they want to be a mentor or if they just want to find out more about the Puddle Project, where do they go? Some of them listen, some of them read.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Okay, so as you have on your screen, which I appreciate, info@thepuddleproject.org is our email address. You can email us and say you’d like to help in some way. You can help financially. Oftentimes we have events where we would love to have some grandparents come and hold the babies or take care of the children, read stories to them while we do other things with the moms. So that’s one way that a retiree can help. Also, as you see there, thepuddleproject.org is our website. You can go there, you can also donate there. You can also donate by Zelle money to info@thepuddleproject.org. So those are ways that you can contribute financially. One thing we do with our moms, we give them a $100 gift card every month along with a board book, which is one of those hard books that can’t be torn up by kids. Because we encourage them, one of the things that they have to do if they’re mentored by us is they have to read to their child every night. So we provide them with a book to do so. So that’s the other way that you could help. You could decide to buy board books for us or give us money to buy board books. And the gift certificates that we give are Walmart gift certificates because one thing we don’t want, we don’t want our girls to have to work during high school because we feel like they have enough to do. If they can keep up with their studies and be excellent parents, that’s more than enough. We try to discourage them from working if they don’t have to. However, some of our moms do have to, but giving them a gift certificate where they can buy diapers and things that they may need for their household is always helpful.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, wow. Okay, ladies and gentlemen who are on, you see it on the lower third here, info@thepuddleproject.org or thepuddleproject.org, their website, and you can find, you can see all of the services and the wonderful things that they do. Dr. Emma, thank you so much for being a guest on tonight’s show. You are doing wonderful, wonderful, wonderful work.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh, it’s been a plum pleasing pleasure. All right, you have a beautiful blessed rest of your evening.

Dr. Shelley Emma
Thank you, you too.

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Alrighty. Wow, she’s doing amazing. The Puddle Project is doing amazing work, amazing work. And what I like to do, one thing that I was remiss and I was told by one of my listeners, I actually say my viewers, I talked about Florida, but she said also check on those who are in Georgia and the Carolinas. So if you, and we are sending prayers to both places, so all three places actually, just everywhere where, oh my God, where this is hit. So I want to thank all of you for tuning in and viewing today. This was a very, very important show. And if you know of teenagers who are pregnant and looking for some support, the Puddle Project. And if you would love, I know some of you would love to be mentors, thepuddleproject.org. So I will see all of you again next Thursday for another guest that will give you so much value. Remember, there are all kinds of relationships and all relationship matters, and there are all kinds of relationship matters. I will see you again next week.

Global Keynote Speaker & Corporate Trainer

Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman “Speaker for All Occasions” is an authentic keynote speaker, corporate trainer, author, life coach, and motivational and inspirational speaker for organizations and companies as well as individuals around the globe. Dr. Fortman gives real world solutions in powerful, engaging and memorable presentations.