Jeffrey Dorman ’06 spent almost two years in a pediatric hospital, supporting his daughter as she recovered from leukemia. The ordeal left him searching for his own kind of healing.
Jeff Dorman ’06 and his wife, Samantha, co-founded the Feeding Families Foundation in 2024 with a mission so fundamental you’d like to think it wouldn’t require a nonprofit: provide free meals at pediatric hospitals to caregivers at the bedsides of their children. The program launched as a pilot at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and has now rolled out in six hospitals, from New Orleans to Oregon, with more to come.
To understand why two busy parents would be compelled to take on such a big responsibility at this point in their lives, you have to go back to August 2022.
As that summer was winding down, Jeff and Sam, like most young families, were not. Both were working, and Sam was almost eight months pregnant with their third daughter. Jeff, a corporate attorney, was working remotely from their home in North Haven, Connecticut, and grateful for the flexibility to do daycare drop-offs and pickups for Olivia, 4, and Harper, who had just turned 2. All of them were excited to welcome the new baby.
One day, Harper spiked a fever of 104 degrees. “Olivia, when she was in daycare, seemed to get sick every other week,” says Jeff. “But it felt like Harper was impervious to germs. We thought we had this immense luck. That changed very, very quickly.”
Their pediatrician told them it was a virus and prescribed pain relievers and cool baths. The fever didn’t break for six days. “I’m thinking, geez, that was a heck of a virus,” says Jeff. Less than a week later, her fever returned. When it came back a third time, Harper had stiff joints and the sweats, too. Each time, the doctor dismissed it as a virus. Jeff and Sam began to panic.
Jeff texted a registered nurse they’d been friendly with years earlier: “What do you make of this?” He asked her to help him get Harper in to see one of the doctors where she worked. After frantic phone calls and faxed forms, they got an appointment for that afternoon. The new doctor listened attentively, then ordered a battery of tests for Harper at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. “As soon as those results came back,” says Jeff, “he called and basically told us, ‘Drop what you’re doing and run.’”
A pediatric oncologist at Yale gave them the news, hedging: “We’re pretty sure it’s leukemia.”
“What are the odds this could be anything else?” asked Jeff.
“Zero” replied the doctor. “We don’t know the type or the genetic subtype, but she has every single symptom.”
Harper was admitted to the hematology oncology unit and treated as an emergency patient with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “I remember asking everybody a million questions,” says Jeff, who did the night shift with Harper for the first several days. “I stayed up all night and learned about the types of leukemia, what it does to bone marrow, what the chemos are, how to read a blood panel. My brain wouldn’t shut off. It was a coping mechanism.”
For almost two weeks, Jeff and Sam took turns at the hospital while the other tried to maintain a modicum of normalcy at home for Olivia. No sooner had they brought Harper home and learned to administer her medications, than Sam had to return to the hospital to give birth to Madison. The day after the two of them came home, Harper spiked another fever, landing her, and Jeff, back in the hospital. It would be the first of many return stays. For the next two and a half years, every day would present Jeff and Sam with a series of obstacles, puzzles, and surprises.
“Everybody on the unit is in the same boat. They’re all nervous, all anxious. They have zero control of the outcome. Our goal is to make a bad situation just a little better.”
By 2024, Harper was home and starting steroid pulses, another grim treatment, as part of maintenance therapy, and Jeff was lamenting the endless bribes they used to get her cooperation. “I don’t get how cancer and kids can even be in the same sentence,” he said to Sam, sinking into the couch. How could they possibly rationalize what Harper was enduring? “There’s got to be a greater reason for all of this. We have to turn this into something positive.” That night they sat and talked through everything they could think of that might help families going through the same nightmare.
One idea rose to the top. When they were first on the ward, they were shocked to discover that most hospitals treating critically and chronically ill children don’t offer food to the caregivers staying with them. Some offer, but for a fee, to have a tray delivered. For a parent consumed by mounting medical bills, that can feel, Jeff says, “like you’re getting kicked while you’re down.” The other choices—skip eating or leave your child alone to go buy food—aren’t better.
Jeff learned firsthand the importance of eating under stress. After he logged months at the hospital, a friendly food service staffer offered to comp him food trays, an allocation she could use at her discretion. “Suddenly I’m starting my day with a cup of coffee and an omelet,” Jeff remembers. “And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got a bit more substance. I can understand and ask better questions and be more present for my daughter.’ It didn’t fix Harper’s diagnosis, but it made a bad situation better.”
For people in distress, receiving a meal is a small act of grace.
Jeff figured out how the food business worked in the hospital—how many trays, the cost per meal, who gets a cut—and started on a nonprofit business plan. He reached out to the staff in the hospital’s development office, who were receptive. He told Julie Fay, an attorney and wife of Mike Fay, his former hockey coach at Williston, what he was trying to do. She introduced him to one of the partners at her firm, Melissa Mack, who, it turns out, is a kindred spirit: Her daughter is also a pediatric cancer survivor. Mack offered to help him, pro bono, set up Feeding Families Foundation as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Next, he recruited two old classmates for the founding board, each with fundraising experience: David Borowsky ’06 and Williston Trustee Joseph Wold ’06.
Today, Feeding Families Foundation offers both funds and resources to its hospital partners. Williston friends continue to step up, like David Fontaine ’06 of Fontaine Bros., who recently made a major gift through the Fontaine Community Foundation. Feeding Families’ signature program is its parent-plate program, which allows caregivers to order food trays that are delivered to the room, enabling parents to remain bedside. There are no prequalifying conditions or limits. “Everybody on the unit is in the same boat. They’re all nervous, all anxious. They have zero control of the outcome,” says Jeff. “Our goal is to make a bad situation just a little bit better.” Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital continues to be an incubator for new programs, including birthday cakes for patients and catered meals donated by local restaurants for staff and patients.
Harper is 5 now and cancer free. She doesn’t have memories of the hospital or her treatments. In time, of course, she’ll learn. Jeff and Sam, on the other hand, can still recount the smallest details of those days, almost as if the emergency is ongoing. That fear takes a long time for parents to shake.
The pediatric staff gave Harper a book to take home, Harper Goes to the Hospital. “We read that now,” says Jeff, “and she’s like, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny that they have the same names as us?’”
“Harper, this is about you,’ I’ll tell her. So I think she has an idea of it,” he says. “She has no sense, though, of how strong she is,” he adds. “But I’ve certainly told her that Feeding Families was inspired by everything we went through together.”
To donate to Feeding Families Foundation or to learn more, go to feedingfamiliesfoundation.org.
Who Wants a Pizza?
Harper doesn’t yet understand the ins and outs of the foundation she inspired, but she knows Friday nights are Modern Apizza nights, when she gets to help with deliveries. The pizza joint—a standout even in the Pizza Capital of the U.S.—donates pies each week to the pediatric hematology oncology floor at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. There, stressed, hungry parents get a taste of local love. “Feeding Families Foundation is a magnet for good people—people who volunteer their time and resources, who donate,” says Jeff. “And that has been so cool.”
