Delivery Totals for 2014

2014 was a banner year!  We donated 36,531 items valued at $184,983 to babies born into health and economic crisis.  This was a new annual record!   December 2014 was our biggest donation month ever, with a total of 8.936 items.  What a great way to finish our 15th year!

Donations were up 27% year to year and we grew from a year to year standpoint each quarter.

The Parkland team had challenged us to help by delivering more warm blankets this year and our volunteers executed on the challenge.  We delivered a record number of 2,439 quilts this year and broke our monthly record twice, first in October when we delivered 240 quilts in one month, and again in December when we delivered 295 quilts in a single month!  With our growth in fundraising, we were able to start purchasing fleece on a regular basis to make more fleece blankets.  With our growth in volunteers this year, we delivered stellar results across the board on the handmade items that are the primary work of our organization.

 

Given the significant number of babies born at Parkland each month, they are our primary focus for distributing the items we make and collect, but with our growth this year, we were also able to donate items to JPS as well as increase our donations to the agencies that we work with in East Dallas. 

These amazing results are only possible because of our wonderful volunteers who work tirelessly every month at home and at our work meetings to create beautiful items to cloth and warm the babies born in need here in the DFW area.  In addition to our volunteers, we have so many generous donors who have helped us to purchase materials and sewing supplies and have  donated beautiful sleepers, onesies, socks and other care essentials.  

We are very grateful for sponsorships like DFW Fiber Fest, TPHCCA Conference, and DFW Yarn Crawl that allow us to share our story with a broader audience, companies like Texas Instruments, Dell, and Berkley Specialty Underwriting Managers who so generously give back in the communities they serve, and organizations like Northaven UMC, Irving Quilt Guild, Coppell Women's Club, Farmer's Branch Women's Club, Webb Chapel UMC, and so many other local groups who continue to support our efforts year on year!   

THANK YOU ALL for helping so many precious babies this year!

New Web Address for our Blog

Please make note that the new web address for our blog is http://lovethybaby.blogspot.com/

If you would like to subscribe to receive an email notification of each new blog post, you can enter your email address where indicated in the column on the right.  There is ALSO a place to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which is sent out once a month.

LOVE THY BABY!

We changed our name to
Love Thy Baby!

In October, we celebrated our 15^th anniversary as Newborns in Need (NIN), Dallas Area Chapter.  We have enjoyed our affiliation with the national Newborns in Need organization but recently the cost of that affiliation has outweighed the benefits.  As many of you know, the national NIN organization keeps 10% of all the monies a chapter raises in exchange for use of the NIN name, the national website, and the 501c3 tax status/tax returns.  As we have grown, this 10% tax has amounted to a much more significant amount of raised funds leaving our local community and at times has prevented us from competing for grants.   In addition, the NIN reporting requirements have grown and the process for accessing our funds has become less flexible, making it challenging for us to operate efficiently.

Effective January 2015, we have changed our affiliation and become an arm of Love Thy Neighbor (LTN), a local 501c3 that is already providing other services in our area, including a community kitchen and clothing assistance program. As a service arm of the Love Thy Neighbor family, 100% of the money that Love Thy Baby will raise can be used to help needy newborns in our community.  In addition to keeping the monies that we raise on our own, LTN will help us raise more money and grow awareness of our organization in the community.  The LTN board has a proven track record in recruiting volunteers, securing in-kind donations, and raising money to support their other service arms.  This past year, LTN created a Heart Fund and provided grants to several local agencies as a way to spread their reach in the community.  You may remember that as one of the Heart Fund recipients, our NIN chapter received $2,000 in fabric and batting!  To learn more about LTN's current programs, visit our website at www.ltnlovethyneighbor.org.

Change can often be difficult, but in this case, we anticipate a very easy transition.  LTN is adopting us as we are, with no intention of changing what we do or how we do it; their hope is to help us grow by recruiting more volunteers and raising more money for materials.  We will continue to meet in the same location, on the same days, at the same time.  We will work with the same wonderful hospitals and agencies to distribute our handiwork.  And of course, we will be the same great group of volunteers with a passion for helping needy babies!

Love Thy Baby will be represented on the board of directors of Love Thy Neighbor and as current President, Kay has committed to serve in that capacity for the first year to ensure a smooth transition.  If you have any questions about our change in affiliation, please feel free to reach out to any of us in person, by phone or via email at lovethybaby@ltnlovethyneighbor.org.

We are very excited to begin this next chapter in the life of our organization and hope you will celebrate this step with us.  Thank you for your continued support and for making Love Thy Baby the best place in the Dallas area to volunteer!

kitchen and a clothing assistance program. As a service arm of the Love Thy Neighbor family, 100% of the money that

Kay Stephenson                     Patricia Clay-Jolly
Wanda Singer                         Marge Bessire
Betsy Winkle                           Dotty Darrin
Katherine Thompson                Lassie Smith

2014 Partners - Berkley Specialty Underwriting Managers

Given we are an organization focused on babies, it is rather fitting that we should be "adopted" this year by Berkley Specialty Underwriting Managers.  Berkley has a long standing history of giving back to the community and their Irving office has always been a leader within their firm. 

Berkley reached out to us in the 2nd quarter to say that they wanted to partner with us for the rest of the year and they set up an employee activity in support of our mission for each remaining quarter.

In an earlier post, we shared about the loom knitting classes that we taught in their office and the amazing donation of handmade hats they made in the 2nd quarter.  We are happy to report that their enthusiastic employees continued to make hats and donated over 300 over the course of the year. 

3Q Donations from Berkley

In the third quarter, they held a Sleepers in September drive for us and donated 191 beautiful new items of warm clothing (in addition to their handmade hats!)

In the fourth quarter, they held a Nickels for Newborns drive and each employee saved their change during the month of November and they provided us with a "very heavy" donation of coins totaling $472.50!

We are so thankful for the management and employees at Berkley and their incredible generosity and we hope to continue our relationship with them in the coming years.  It is so wonderful to see a company that believes in giving back and wholeheartedly supports it!

If you know of a company who might be interested in partnering with us for 2015, please let us know!  You can contact us at 

lovethybaby@LTNlovethyneighbor.org. 

Deliveries to John Peter Smith Hospital

Given our continued growth in volunteers and their generous donation of handmade items, especially hats, we have been able to start delivering some NIN items to JPS Hospital in Ft. Worth in addition to our other agency deliveries.  While not as large as Parkland, JPS delivers 300-400 babies per month and many of these infants are born sick, premature or into economic crisis.  Thank you to Katherine Thompson for being willing to drive to Ft. Worth to make the deliveries and forge a relationship with the staff there.

We received a lovely card from JPS thanking us for our recent donations that read as follows:

We've already begun to get many compliments from our new moms for the caps we've been sharing with them!  Thank you so much for these great "extras" we can share with our patients - it means so much to them and to us.  May some of the joy you've created at JPS come back to you and your fellow members of Newborns in Need this holiday season.  All the best, LouAnne Smith

LouAnne Smith, their volunteer coordinator, visited our work meeting on January 8th and shared with our group more about their program and on-going needs.

2014 Christmas Bag Delivery

Our annual Christmas bag project for Parkland was a huge success!  Thanks to the generosity of our volunteers in purchasing sleepers and socks and working diligently to make Christmas bags, blankets, hats, booties, stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, bibs and burp cloths, we were able to complete 363 bags AND leave extra clothing sets and hats as well.

The Parkland auxiliary contributed books, educational toys and picture frames to include in the sacks making for a very substantial gift for the newborns that were born over the week before Christmas! 

If we try to thank everyone who played a role in this project, we would run out of space here, but we did want to say thank you to Lassie Smith who stored, organized and counted the clothing for the bags in her home all year, Marge Vissers who sewed all the Christmas bags, Debbie Carver who made all the Christmas ornaments, and the Knit Wits at Coppell Senior Center who made the majority of the bibs and burp cloths under Paula Feldman's leadership.

Additional photos available here:  2014 Christmas Bag Delivery to Parkland

DFW Yarn Crawl

Thanks to DFW Yarn Crawl for selecting us as their charity of the year in 2014.  A special thank you to Peggy Urban who drove to all the participating yarn shops in the area before the event to drop off information about Newborns in Need and then returned after the event to pick up the donations!  That was a lot of miles!

We received numerous skeins of yarn for use in making hats, afghans, sweaters, and booties!

15th Anniversary Celebration

On November 1, about 70 of our amazing volunteers celebrated our 15th anniversary as a chapter of Newborn in Need with a wonderful luncheon.  In addition to enjoying the yummy food in our potluck salad buffet, we were honored to have Lisa Little, Director of Volunteer & Guest Services at Parkland, who shared how much it means to the families that receive our beautiful handmade items!

Other special guests included John and Pam Schindler, the Charity co-chairs for the TPHCCA Conference and they presented us with the final check for $1,387 from the silent auction they held on our behalf in late September.  Traci Long and Mary Ann Saxton from Love Thy Neighbor were also our guests and their organization donated $2,000 in fabric and batting in November!  We are so blessed!

John Schindler from TPHCCA

Mary Ann Saxton and Traci Long from Love Thy Neighbor

Lisa Little from Parkland

Thanks to the wonderful volunteers who helped organize the luncheon. Marge Vissers and Carol Terry planned the event and coordinated the set up, food, decorations, and clean up.  Betsy Winkle designed and set up our beautiful centerpieces. Katherine Thompson put together our great slide show of past and present volunteer pictures. Liz Dickson, Nancy Bloomfield and Pat Curry helped with set up and clean up. Paula Feldman handled check in for the luncheon, Jennifer Jolly made our special celebration cake, and Janice Bond helped with pre-luncheon planning and gift wrap even though she could not attend the luncheon. So many other volunteers jumped in to help, it is impossible to list them all but we do so appreciate everyone who helped make it a great luncheon!

To view additional photos from the event, visit 15th Anniversary Pictures

TPHCCA Conference

Texas Professional Home Child Care Association (TPHCCA) selected Newborns In Need as principle charity for their 26th Annual Educational Enrichment Conference which was held September 18-20 in Duncanville, TX.

The silent auction was a huge success raising $1,387!  The final check was presented at our 15th anniversary celebration on November 3.  They also held a clothing drive and collected 300 new items and 185 gently used items for Newborns In Need.

The success of the event was the direct result of the hard work of John and Pam Schindler who organized both the silent auction and the clothing drive, solicited donations for the silent auction and made sure that every auction item received a fair bid!  We thoroughly enjoyed working with the two of them!  Thanks John and Pam!

Our volunteers played an important role as well.  Our thanks go out to Susan McKinney, Anne Henderson, Ellie Wakeman, Dotty Darrin, Lassie Smith, Teresa Leszczynski and Kay Stephenson who donated items for the silent auction and Janice Bond, Marge Vissers, Sara Dreiman, Lassie Smith, Nancy Bloomfield, and Kay Stephenson who helped staff the silent auction room and Marge Bessire, who was kind enough to help pick up all the donations at the end of the conference.

Above: Volunteer donations for the Silent Auction.  Below: Donated clothing items and John Schindler presenting the final check at our 15th anniversary celebration.

Sleepers in September 2014

Trudy White, Kay Stephenson, Paula Feldman, Ginny Rogers, and Shari Nevels hosted a shower at the Coppell Senior and Community Center.

Sleepers in September was a wonderful success this year!  Showers or drives were held at the Coppell Women's Club, Webb Chapel United Methodist Church Seniors group, the Beta Omicron chapter of Alpha Delta Kappa, the Coppell Senior Center, Berkley Specialty Underwriting Managers and Sacred Heart of Jesus Chinese Parish.  In addition to sleepers, we collected socks and onesies and other care essentials at the showers.  When you include the overwhelming generosity of our own volunteers who donated over 200 sleepers, we received a total of 749 sleepers for the winter months!  

As you know, we include a sleeper in each of the special holiday bags that we put together for Parkland in December, but this year we collected enough sleepers to include in the regular December clothing packages AND to provide extras to the child life specialists at Parkland to distribute throughout all the winter months.   

Wanda Singer, Paula Feldman & Kay Stephenson hosted a shower at the Coppell Women's Club.

Marge Vissers and Kay Stephenson hosted a shower at Webb Chapel United Methodist Church Seniors Group.

Jackie Acres and Kay Stephenson hosted a shower for the Beta Omicron chapter of Alpha Delta Kappa.