See Beautiful Grant Applicant: Love Not Lost

The feature below is brought to you by Love Not Lost, 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 Love Not Lost, please visit their website page: here.

Celebrating life and preserving memories

Love Not Lost sees beautiful in our world of suffering and grief because we see the love, life, and joy in every person. We're on a mission to revolutionize the way we grieve, making sure everyone feels loved and supported in their pain. We do this through three major programs: photography, grief support, and corporate care.

In the past, See Beautiful has helped us grow our photography program, which provides free portrait sessions to those facing a terminal diagnosis to celebrate life and preserve memories. After the sessions, we provide beautiful hand-crafted albums to pass along to loved ones throughout the generations at no cost to the families we serve. These albums not only serve as a tool that supports loved ones in grief, but they can also be a source of peace and joy in the years to come. 

In 2018, we partnered with Northside Hospital to start serving their stage 4 cancer patients across the state. We've added photographer volunteers in the greater Atlanta area and will continue to grow our base of talented, caring people to serve with us. Our vision is to continue expanding our photographer program to take it to new cities as early as next year as we work to serve people across the entire nation.

Through our photography program, we learned that sometimes we were the only ones showing up for the families we served. We saw there was a need to help people in the community move through the awkwardness and fear of reaching out to offer support and show up too. As a result, our grief support program was born. Through this program, we have launched empathy cards, care cards, gift-a-session certificates, and other tools to help people have a well-designed, tangible way to engage someone they care about who is hurting. 

Our most recent tool is actually a website, www.HowCanILoveYouBetter.com, which is our care card in a digital form that is available to everyone. And it's not just about supporting people only through death, but any hard life situation like a job loss, divorce, family transition, diagnosis, required move, etc.

As we work to empower the community through these tools and resources, we realized there's a difference between being supported at work versus being supported at home. People tend to spend half (or even more than half) of their lives at the office. Supporting a coworker can look very different than supporting a neighbor or a close friend. We want to make sure people are supported in ALL areas of their lives, which is what led us to create our new Corporate Care Program. 

Any time we bring on a new photographer, we take them through a retreat where we teach self-awareness, self-care, empathy, and grief support training. With the help of a C-level executive coach and a certified therapist, we have taken that photography training and made some adjustments to bring it to the workplace. We are excited to be able to offer this training to C-level execs, upper management, and entire teams. Not only will this equip management and colleagues to support people at work, but it will radically improve company cultures, especially around grief.

As we carry out our mission to celebrate life, preserve memories, and support people in grief, we would love to have you join us to revolutionize the way we grieve and support others in grief. Visit www.lovenotlost.org to share, donate, volunteer, or meet us at one of our upcoming events. Thank you! ​

Written by: Ashley Jones

Founder/Executive Director, Love Not Lost