How Two Foster Moms Built a Nonprofit to Keep Families Together: The Moms Connect Dubuque Story

I'll pull back the curtain a little: I walked into this interview with my questions prepped, sent, and tidy. Then Kristina Heinzen and Gina Martin answered the very first one and the whole conversation went somewhere else entirely. (The good kind of somewhere else.)

Kristina and Gina met in foster parent licensing classes in 2019. They went in believing they'd be the ones rescuing kids from hard situations.

What they found instead were moms who loved their kids fiercely and had nobody. No support system. No steady people. So they did something that really shouldn't be...