Dear Friends of Feeding Matters,

I am so pleased to be back after a wonderful (and messy and loud!) maternity leave. I return ready to fiercely advocate for children with PFD, their families, and the professionals who treat them.

A lesson that has helped me recently in coming back after maternity leave is finding power in the pause. Much of what I do here at Feeding Matters involves thinking, setting strategy, and empowering the team. We have goals that will take 15 years to accomplish and some that will take three months. It can be easy to get pulled into one of the many areas of the PFD system of care that need attention and admittedly, it is sometimes hard not to react. But I’m learning there is power in pause and power in reflection. This space allows me and the Feeding Matters team to stay focused on strategy and the areas that will make the largest impact.

With this focus on our strategy, I have a few general aims that I hope to achieve for Feeding Matters and our internal team:

• Trauma Informed, Healing Organization: While I do believe most of our programs are trauma-informed, we are never done learning and need to be constantly evolving and growing. I want to ensure that we are trauma informed in all of our programming and continue to grow as a healing organization aware of trauma and its impact to an individual and a system.
• More Content: We are working to bring you more educational and awareness content that supports the needs of parents, professionals, and caregivers. This includes webinars, blogs, articles, and more.
• A Greater Movement for PFD: As we continue to build awareness for pediatric feeding disorder, we are creating a movement to ensure children are identified early and have access to the support and treatment that they need. This year, that movement will get even stronger. To start, we will have the biggest PFD Awareness Month (May) yet!
• A united community: Often, Feeding Matters has served as a neutral place for all perspectives to exist and ideas to be shared and discussed. We aim to continue this effort and take great pride in this responsibility. But as the world of feeding continues to get more complex, this task becomes even more difficult. That is why we remain dedicated to listening to our community, working toward consensus, advancing research, and innovation in an ever-evolving field.

For myself, and what I hope to bring to my team, is to continue working on living and breathing our values daily. Our team values are collaboration, innovation, and inclusion. We work to grow each day as leaders serving our community so that we can achieve our vision of creating a world where children with PFD will thrive. To do this, we will ensure we always make time for and find power in the pause.

Happy to be back,
Jaclyn

Jaclyn Pederson, MHI
Feeding Matters CEO