367 Babies and Counting: How One Conversation Changed Everything. Elana Frank didn't set out to build a national nonprofit. She just couldn't stop thinking about a conversation in a baby pool.
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
By Elana Frank, MPA
CEO & Founder, Jewish Fertility Foundation (JFF)
It started with three women and a baby pool.
I was sitting at a JCC with two other Jewish mothers, all of us watching our children splash around, all of us having built our families through IVF. Somewhere in the easy back-and-forth of new motherhood, we started doing the math out loud. One woman had spent $20,000. Another had spent $60,000. I had spent almost nothing — because I'd gone through my treatments while living in Israel, where IVF is fully covered as basic healthcare.
Same age. Same religion. Same level of education. The only difference was geography. And in that moment, sitting on the edge of that pool, I couldn't “unknow” what I now knew: that in America, the ability to build a family often comes down to how much money you have.
I went home and founded the Jewish Fertility Foundation.
Building something from nothing
When I launched JFF, there was no national Jewish organization focused specifically on fertility. There were women sitting alone in waiting rooms, terrified and financially overwhelmed, without community or support. There were couples quietly grieving pregnancy losses that no one around them acknowledged. There were Jewish families — carriers of Tay-Sachs, BRCA mutations, and other genetic conditions — facing fertility challenges that were medically complex and financially devastating, often both at once.
I knew what it felt like to go through fertility treatment. I knew what the isolation felt like. And I knew that the Jewish value of l'dor v'dor — from generation to generation — had to mean something more than a phrase we say in Synagogue. If our community truly believed in building Jewish futures, we had to show up for the people trying to create the next generation.
So we started small: financial grants, emotional support, and a willingness to talk openly about something most people suffered through in silence.
What eleven years of impact looks like
Today, the numbers tell a story I couldn't have imagined sitting at that pool. JFF has distributed 557 fertility grants and allocated over $3.26 million in grants, loans, and clinic discounts to Jewish individuals and families across the country. We have 79 pregnancies currently underway among our grant recipients. And most importantly: 367 babies have been born to families who came through JFF.
Three hundred and sixty-seven children who exist, in part, because someone decided that no family should have to choose between financial survival and becoming a parent.
But the impact goes beyond the numbers. We've built a community where people don't have to suffer in silence. We've trained Jewish institutions to talk about fertility, loss, and longing with the same openness we bring to every other lifecycle moment.
We've shown that a nonprofit with deep values and a clear mission can move the needle on one of the most personal challenges a person can face.
What's next
We're not done. JFF is launching Belonging While Longing, a workplace training for Jewish nonprofit HR and executive leaders, because we know the next frontier is getting Jewish institutions to extend that care to their own employees through better benefits and more compassionate policies.
Every number in our impact report represents a human being who wanted to become a parent and needed someone to stand with them. That's why JFF exists. That's why I built it. And that's why, eleven years in, I'm more committed than ever to the work.
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