Love for Lily

Love for Lily aims to support families in the NICU and after discharge. We aim to provide items that will bring a little light to their dark time in the hospital, we provide emotional support in-unit and continuing after discharge. We seek to create a community to support mothers through all of their struggles for example, post-partum depression, anxiety and PTSD. We help to alleviate a small amount of the financial burden for ongoing hospital therapies. In addition, we create a supportive community for families. We focus on the mothers, who have a continuously growing community of current NICU mothers who are supported by past-NICU mothers. We seek to help with the isolation that comes from the NICU experience and emotional hardships that can impede a healthy family and life. Additionally, for families who experience the death of a child Love for Lily provides a helping hand, a stuffed animal weighted to their child's birth weight and a safe place to share their experience.

Our strategies for supporting NICU families are vast. We provide "Essential Bags" to the families in the NICU which contain toothpaste, toothbrushes, face wash, hand sanitizer, tissues, chapstick, snacks, a journal to write down thoughts or info, and other supplies to survive and feel a little bit normal. We run a weekly support group that is run by a licensed life coach, inside the NICU, with breakfast provided for mothers to connect and be supported. We have a grant program for families to get some reprieve on their ongoing hospital therapy bills. We also support families after they are discharged with an ongoing Post-NICU group that meets weekly. We have a vibrant facebook community and a separate, private facebook group for NICU moms where past and present NICU moms share advice, encouragement and support. Additionally, we have bimonthly volunteer engagements and alternating bimonthly fundraisers to connect families in person and cultivate our community.

Our founder is a past NICU mother, whose baby was born prematurely and did not survive. Because of her deeply personal connection to this work, she is able to provide extensive support to the families. She does bedside visits and has many contacts with families each week, meeting our goals to support families emotionally. We have a network of volunteers that are active almost weekly and are able to keep our programs functioning smoothly. We have bimonthly fundraisers, work with private donors and corporate partners and are currently working on securing more. We have a Board of Directors that meet once a month and discuss programming, decide on fund allocation and provide hands-on support at our events and programs. We also have staff that maintains the programming to accomplish our goals.

Love for Lily began on Mother's Day 2012, just 6 months after we said goodbye to our daughter, Lily. Lily was born too early, on the fine line between life and death outside the womb, at just 24 weeks gestation. She taught us more about love in her short life than we ever thought possible and now her story lives on in our hearts & the work that we do through Love for Lily.
It started simply, with bringing coffee to other mom's in the NICU and giving them a place to come together to be heard, to process emotions and to hear that they are not alone on this journey. Since then we have developed a program to educate and support families during their NICU stay as well as after they are discharged and take their baby home. We provide Essentials Bags and offer facilitated support groups to families who's babies are in the NICU at four area hospitals: UC Health Anschutz (started May 2012) and Avista Adventist : Centura Health (started March 2017), Presbyterian St. Luke's (started July 2019) and Boulder Community Hospital (started April 2020). We also offer a virtual support program to mothers who live too far away to meet in person and currently during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our facilitated support groups are the pinnacle of our programing.

In 2017 we launched "Lasting Love" a post-NICU program designed especially for NICU Mom's and their babies for one year after discharge that serves mothers from all Denver Metro Area hospitals.

Our newest program, launched in July of 2018, is called "Love, Camden & Friends" in which we provide emotional support for mothers who had a baby that did not survive.

In the 10 years that Love for Lily has been in existence, we have directly supported over 10,000 people and given more than 60 grants to qualified families. We look forward to expanding our programing in the future in order to support more families as they courageously join us on this NICU journey.

Love For Lily is a Member of:
- Postpartum Support International
- The Nonprofit Alliance
- The Boulder Chamber
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