Encore: Work that matters in the second half of life.

Sharon Rohrbach. Photo by S. Smith Patrick.

2007 Purpose Prize winner Sharon Rohrbach’s success in channeling her lifetime of experience into saving the lives of vulnerable newborns was recognized with a $70,000 prize from a major healthcare organization.

Rohrbach, 65 years old, is a St. Louis neo-natal nurse who founded Nurses for Newborns to provide home visits from nurses to underinsured mothers and their special-needs babies.

Nurses for Newborns was the winner among 300 entries for the Care Award from Premier Inc., an association of 1,700 hospitals. The award recognizes the nation’s top community health organizations.

“We were honored for forming a system to measure improvement in healthcare status and producing consistent improvement among very high-risk infants over a wide geographic area and a period of several years,” Rohrbach explained.

Last fall, Rohrbach was awarded a $100,000 Purpose Prize from Civic Ventures, which highlights and invests in social innovators over 60.

“There is something very personally rewarding about making life and society better for someone else. You inadvertently make life better for yourself in the process,” she said. “I don’t want to give up working for what I perceive to be a much less exciting life of leisure.”

Providing essential education and support to new parents, the Nurses for Newborns Foundation conducts more than 15,000 home visits annually.

Rohrbach has no plans to slow down. “My goal is to expand Nurses for Newborns services nationally because our programs save babies’ lives,” she said.

At the same time, Rohrbach is launching another organization, Dynamic Change, LLC, to help community organizations expand their services and measure their outcomes.