After work one evening, we stuck around the office a little longer, ordered pizza, and set up to make blankets for Brooke’s Place and their Holiday Store.
We were introduced to Brooke’s Place through Arianna, who has supported their work for the past few years and helped bring this opportunity to our team.
Arianna, Steve, Ian, Hannah, Sophie, and Loren split into a rhythm pretty quickly. We spread out across the floor with fabric around us, working through each blanket. Some of us cut the fabric while the others tied. By the end of the night, we had a stack of blankets ready to go. Each one was made for someone we won’t meet, but someone we know might need it.
Brooke’s Place supports children, teens, and families who are navigating grief after the death of a loved one. Through support groups, therapy services, and community education, they create space for people to process loss in ways that feel understood and supported.
That kind of support matters more than most people realize. In Central Indiana alone, thousands of children will experience the death of a loved one before they reach adulthood. It’s something that often shows up quietly (in behavior, in school, in day-to-day life) and it doesn’t always get recognized for what it is.
The work Brooke’s Place does meets that reality consistently and on an ongoing basis.
The Holiday Store is one part of that work, but it carries a different kind of weight.
Each year, families are invited to come in and select gifts for the people in their lives, completely free of charge. It’s set up to feel familiar, because for many families, the holidays don’t feel that way anymore.
Often, the person they lost was the one who made the season what it was. The one who helped pick out gifts, who created traditions, who made everything feel normal. The Holiday Store doesn’t replace that, but it gives families a way to continue giving.
More than 400 young people and their caregivers participated last year. Behind that number are families figuring out how to move through a season that can feel especially heavy. One participant said of last year, “This season has been extremely hard for our family with back-to-back losses. Thank you for bringing us joy today. Watching my kids pick gifts for people they love really made me smile. Thank you.” This is what it is all about.
The blankets we made are a small part of that experience, but they’re also one of the few things that leave with families and stay with them. They end up on the couch, at the end of a bed, or wrapped around someone on a quiet night. Blankets don’t always stand out, but they’re there when they’re needed.
There’s something about that that sticks with you.
We’re grateful to have contributed in a small way to the work Brooke’s Place is doing every day. It was a few hours out of our week, but it’s part of something that continues well beyond that.
Posted in Community
