The Legal Stuff... A Big Hill to Climb

I am making some progress in many areas (more on that in another post). However, the most daunting task right now seems to be hiring an attorney. I have been in touch with some organizations that help non profits and they have advised me to hire an attorney that has experience setting up this type of non profit organization. They said that since I will be accepting donations from across state lines and providing funds to hospitals outside of North Carolina, that it may be a bit complicated.

In addition, the application for 501(c)(3) Non Profit status has become more challenging since 9/11 and the application will frequently be returned to you if something is not done exactly right. The approval process can take anywhere from 3-12 months. I have had a couple of recommendations to attorneys who have a little bit of experience in this and I have even had a pro-bono offer from someone who has not done this before at all. I greatly appreciate these offers and recommendations.

However, I would like to get the non profit status as quickly as possible and therefore, I would like an attorney who has done this at least several times before. I would like to find someone who knows all of the "government gotchas" and possible "snags". Unfortunately, I am having a very hard time successfully finding and getting in touch with someone like that. I have had a couple of referrals but those people will not call me back. Then someone told me they knew the perfect person but they had just died of cancer (that is sad irony). So, I find myself willing to pay someone out of my own unemployed pocket (a fee that I have been told can cost up to $5K) so I am caught in this ugly chicken and egg game. I will have a hard time raising operating funds or any kind of funds until I get through with the legal stuff.

So, this week, I will start again... making phone calls, reaching out to more people, trying to make more contacts in the non profit world so that I can find an experienced attorney that can help make Striving For More a reality.

On another note, an exciting thing happened while I was networking last week, I met the woman who started the RTP Dress for Success (what an inspiring woman and a wonderful organization). She told me that Duke has a Non Profit Management Certificate Course and that it was excellent. I have reviewed it and I am excited about it. I plan on starting those courses in January. I will register for that this week as well.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable Thanksgiving. Ours was very nice. It was sad for me in the morning but as the day progressed and we were distracted by the festivities and food that we enjoyed with our friends, it got much easier than I thought it would be. So, we got through our first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Thanks to everyone who continues to pray for us. I am sure it is helping us to get through each day with strength.

It is the quiet times that are always the hardest. I chose not to participate in decorating the tree this year. I just couldn't do it as that is something I always did with the girls. Vince and Mackenna did it this year together. Mackenna told me that she decorated a whole section with ornaments that reminded her of Colleen or that are Colleen's. I asked her if it made her cry and she said yes. I told her that it was ok to cry and told her that the psychologist in the grief group that Vince and I go to told us that each tear is accompanied by a memory that needs to be remembered. I like thinking about it that way. I think she liked that too.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you
just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.
You wait, and watch and work: you don't give up.
~ Anne Lamott ~

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A Name and a Mission for the Nonprofit

When I got serious about starting this nonprofit organization, I had it in my head that I had to come up with a name and a mission statement before I did anything else. This was much harder than you would think. I was so busy studying and learning about everything nonprofit and about psychosocial care, every creative morsel in my body was tapped (and I don’t have that many to begin with). So I asked a few friends to help me with this. The reason that this is so tricky is because when you like a name, you need to make sure that the acronym doesn’t spell something funky, as the web addict that I am, I wanted to make sure that the domain name was available (which turned out to be the biggest challenge) and it had to just feel right. In the end, we came up with a name that I love.


We struggled for a few days bit with the tag line but I challenged Vince and he stood up to the challenge and came up with a great suggestion.


When I felt like there was no going back, I immediately went out to the web and registered the domain name (more than 10 different versions so if people go to the wrong version they will get redirected to our site). In the process of registering the domains I needed some advice, I called upon a neighbor who I knew would know the answers. During this phone call, he offered to host my domains for free. You see, he owns WebGraFxx. What a great start, I am unemployed and I am clearly going to need donated services because starting a business, even a nonprofit one, is costly.


So here it is… it isn’t in a fancy marketing format yet (this is just my Microsoft Word version of the name).



You can also check out my current mission statement which is on my draft web page (also not the final product) as I am still trying to figure out how that will be designed and by whom, etc. But you can check it out at www.striving4more.org

On a personal note, as we get closer to Thanksgiving, it is a getting a bit sadder for us. Our family was split apart last year. Mackenna and I spent the day with the Speerschneiders (our next door neighbors and good friends) and Vince was with Colleen at the hospital. It was a very bad day for Vince and Colleen as she had a bad day of bleeding and they could not figure out why she was bleeding so badly. Everyone says that the firsts will be the hardest and now we realize that they are right. But it isn't just the firsts. It is the days and weeks leading up the firsts. Christmas is on our minds a lot. I am worried about how to make the it not so obvious that there are half as many gifts under the tree so it won't be so sad for Mackenna. I know the right thing is not to buy her more and besides I couldn't even if I thought it was the right thing. We need to just get through this, experience it.


Vince and I attend a grief group at UNC and the psychologist that leads it says that with each set of tears are memories that need to remembered and that we shouldn't try to not cry or prevent these times of grief. I guess I am just bummed because I thought I had gotten past the worst part and I was doing pretty well now. Now I realize that there are peaks and valleys and gigantic hills of grief that I must climb and I am pretty sure I am approaching one now as this holiday season is upon us.

In so many years past (during our early years in NC), we spent Thanksgiving alone as a family. We have even eaten Chinese food on Thanksgiving. The reason for this is because both Mackenna and Colleen were born in early December and my doctor told me not to travel. This year, my family is all up in New Jersey and although we were invited, we elected not to travel up North. Although I never had a problem with being alone as a family on Thanksgiving before, I was very sad at the thought this year. I think it was because having just the three of us here would have amplified the loss of Colleen even more. I am tremendously thankful that my very good friend Joelle invited us over to her house to share the day with them. Mackenna is looking forward to it as well as she enjoys spending time with Myers.


No matter what you are doing on Thanksgiving, I hope you have a blessed day.

O Lord that lends me life,

Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.

~William Shakespeare ~

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Back to Blogging

It has been over two months since I last posted a blog entry and a lot has happened in those last two months. I returned to work after Colleen’s death and an associated leave on September 22nd. On October 1st, my company laid off close to 450 people and I was one of them. Although we remain employed until 12/8, we were asked to leave the building that day and I have not been back since. It was a bit of a shock on our systems and for me, a bit of a grieving process started all over again. I had worked at Sony Ericsson for more than 9 years and made many close friends during that time. Although I expect to stay close to some of them, the economy will likely take many of them out of state and make maintaining relationships very difficult.

My “forced career transition” came with mixed emotions. I felt God pushing me into the direction service to ensure that children with cancer get the emotional care that they are now lacking but I was not sure what that looked like or when I would find the time to do it once I was back at work. I also knew that I no longer had the passion to do what I was doing before as it suddenly felt so meaningless. So now that I no longer had the job to worry about, I felt that God was giving me a big kick in the butt in that direction. But as Vince’s job at Nortel suddenly became threatened by layoffs, I worked on my resume and attended job fairs at the out placement agency that my company had provided us. This is when I realized that I was miserable and that unless I was forced to go back to the type of job I once had to keep food on the table, I could not do that type of work any longer. My decision was made. I was changing careers. Fortunately, Vince quickly got word that his job would be safe (at least for a while). Thank God.

So I have been spending all of my time researching, networking and speaking to doctors and psychologists all over the country. Learning how the best hospitals provide psychosocial care to kids with cancer. Psychosocial care is care that includes psychologists, social workers, child life specialists, and pastors. It is all of the people that care for the child’s mind, heart and spirit while the doctors and nurses care for the child’s body. But the true key is that everyone on the team, including the doctors and the nurses must care for the overall wellbeing of the child or it isn’t as effective. It is a complete culture change for most medical institutions. It was sad when I realized that some of the hospitals listed in the US News and World Report’s Top 20 Pediatric Cancer Hospitals don’t even have the resources to cover all of the components of psychosocial care, let alone succeed with the culture.

So what have I done with all this information? After talking to so many people and learning as much as I could about fundraising inside the hospital, I decided that the best thing to do was to fundraise outside of the hospital. Therefore, I have decided to establish a National Non Profit Organization and I have been working diligently on this effort. It is actually pretty complex. I have been reading, researching, meeting with people and making progress here and there. Since this entry is pretty long already, my next entry will tell you what I have done so far, there is a lot of work ahead of me and I need a lot of help. The exciting thing is that I am learning something completely new while still being able to capitalize on the skills that God gave me.

Be sure to subscribe to this new blog up in the left hand corner. Enter your email address, after you respond to the confirmation email you will get from feedburner, you will receive an email each time I update this blog. You can unsubscribe at any time if I start to bore you. I hope you stay along for the journey.

I would like to close by telling you one of the main things that keeps me working long hours on this project. On Saturday, May 24, 2008, Vince and I had to tell Colleen that we had to cancel her Make a Wish trip to swim with the dolphins. That we had to cancel her trip to Houston to participate in the phase 2 trial and that the doctors were going to stop treatment and send her home because her PET scan showed that the cancer had spread significantly and they did not know how else to treat it. That the only way for her body to be healed would be to go to heaven.

We had to tell Colleen that she was going to die soon…..

Do you know that the hospital did not have any type of psychological or spiritual support to offer us on that day or any other day that we were there? That makes me so sad. How many children are told that they have a life threatening illness or worse, that they are going to die and do not have the proper emotional support to help them cope with that?

To my knowledge, there is currently no other nonprofit organization in this country that is working to fund this issue. Colleen’s situation turned out one way but studies are showing that meeting psychosocial needs of patients with cancer can even improve outcomes and recovery. The hospitals are spending all of their money on research. Research to find treatments and cures for cancer. Treatments and cures that will hopefully keep our children alive. That priority seems correct to me.

This must be my purpose right now, and I have the passion to pursue it.

Take the first step in faith.
You don't have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~

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