Grant Applicant: Forrest Spence Fund

 The feature below is brought to you by the Forrest Spence Fund, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about The Forrest Spence Fund, please visit their website: here.

Wrapping Families in Care.

The Forrest Spence Fund is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, founded in 2007 in honor of Robert Forrest Spence. The mission of the Forrest Spence Fund is to assist with the non-medical needs of critically or chronically ill children and their families throughout the Mid-South. Inspired by the compassion they received and the families they met during the hospitalization of their own son Forrest, Brittany and David Spence felt compelled to give back to families going through similar circumstances and to the institutions who care for them.

The Forrest Spence Fund is unique in that it does not follow a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Representatives seek to truly know families in their care, understand their unique circumstances, and meet their non-medical needs accordingly. The Fund functions under four main areas: Individual Needs, Institutional Support, Counseling, and Grants.

With the understanding that each family’s journey is unique, we offer numerous services to assist with the individual needs of families. The Forrest Spence Fund got its start 11 years ago by providing Care Bags filled with items to help families navigate the hospital environment. These bags are filled with toiletries, quarters for the vending machine, note pads, snacks and gender and age specific comfort items for the hospitalized child. These Care Bags give us the ability to reach families and walk alongside them during their journey.

Ways that we help individual families include paying individual bills such as mortgage/rent, utility bills and phone bills. We also assist with transportation needs, provide meal vouchers for the hospital cafeteria and purchase non-medical necessities such as cribs, bouncy seats, pumping bras for nursing mothers, etc. to help caregivers provide long term care for their child.

We know that the recovery of the hospitalized child encompasses the wellbeing of the entire family.  To accomplish this, we partner with the institutions to broaden our reach and help more families. We do this by purchasing non-medical items from the institutions’ wishlist, sponsoring Comfort Carts that are stocked with essential items and are pushed from room to room each week to give caregivers the items they need to care for themselves. We also fund and fully stock rooms inside the institutions such as the Forrest Sibling Playroom, a safe space inside Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital for healthy siblings to play in a normalized setting.

Each month, we host a Family Dinner to feed a complimentary meal to anyone with a loved one hospitalized at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. We are in constant communication with the institutions to assess family needs and create new ways to help families cope with childhood illness. On top of these services and programs that we already provide, we are looking forward to implementing new projects in 2019 that will continue to meet the needs of families.

The Forrest Spence Bereavement Cart is one of these projects. The Bereavement Carts are filled with items that offer comfort, rejuvenation, relaxation and memory making for families with a child facing an end of life circumstance. This allows us to wrap our arms around families during their darkest days.

While we offer support and compassion to families facing the end of life, we also celebrate new life with multiple programs that benefit babies in the NICU. In 2019, we are thrilled to introduce the Forrest Spence NICU Development Center at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. The NICU Development Center is stocked with items we have purchased from a wishlist created by NICU therapists to aid in the recovery and development of NICU babies.

We recently covered the cost to update the Forrest Spence Family Kitchen inside Children’s Hospital at Erlanger in Chattanooga. This is a space for families to relax, reflect and replenish.  In addition to providing spaces and programs for families of hospitalized children, we provide items such as our Unit Appreciation Bags to hospital staff each month to show our appreciation for the work they do.

The life-altering illness or loss of a child is one of the most unimaginable experiences that any family can face. We understand the importance of healthy processing and healing following a devastating circumstance.  When counseling is needed, we connect families with a professional counselor and pay 100% of the cost for up to 12 counseling sessions for grieving families.

Finally, we know the financial strain that accompanies childhood illness. For families who are struggling to make ends meet, we provide a grant in the form of a personal check for up to $5,000.00 for families who can demonstrate a need. These grants help sustain families and get them back on their feet during a time of crisis.

Throughout our tenure, we have seen amazing growth. We began at one hospital in Memphis, where we steadily expanded our services to other area hospitals including Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Germantown Methodist NICU and Baptist Children’s Hospital. In 2017, we expanded our reach across Tennessee to Nashville and Chattanooga. To date, over 64,000 families have been impacted by Forrest Spence Fund, and we are constantly looking for new opportunities to reach more families and institutions dealing with childhood illness.

We are driven by our mission, and our work to assist with non-medical needs of critically and chronically ill children and their families will never be finished.

Written by:

Abby Cooley, Program Director, Forrest Spence Fund