May Mental Health Matching

May is Mental Health Month, and Taylor's Gift Foundation is excited to share the great work we've been doing to help North Texas families navigate their grief after the loss of a loved one.

Taylor’s Gift Foundation is an award-winning 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission to provide grief support to families of organ, eye, and tissue donors. The Foundation was created by Todd and Tara Storch of Coppell, who lost their thirteen-year-old daughter Taylor in a tragic skiing accident. Through organ donation, Taylor was able to save and improve the lives of five individuals with her gifts of life. The Storchs’ pain sparked a passion and purpose for helping others who are walking a similar grief journey.  

Currently, Taylor’s Gift Foundation is the only known non-profit in the United States offering grief support specifically designed for donor families. A donor family is a family whose loved one gave the gift of life through organ, eye or tissue donation. The grief of a donor family is unique because of the mixed emotions involved: grief--from the sudden loss, and gratefulness--from knowing their loved one saved lives. Having a loved one be a donor is where grief and gratefulness share the same space. 

Knowing how complex the grieving process can be for donor families, we created the Taylor’s Gift Grief Support Program to fill this need. Taylor’s Gift Foundation provides a novel and comprehensive way to provide grief support at no cost to the donor family. Through a peer-to-peer support model, we surround donor family members with a circle of understanding and compassion from others who have experienced a similar grief journey. We do this by connecting donor family members with our compassionate Caring Guides and Support Groups.

 Our Caring Guides all have personal experience with grief and loss.  They combine their lived grief experience with education and evidence-backed techniques to help grieving individuals and families develop coping skills to better understand and manage the loss of their loved ones. Additionally, each of our Caring Guides and Support Group Facilitators have completed comprehensive training for their specific role.

Who We Serve

Our program is primarily offered to underserved populations:  individuals who otherwise have no access to mental health services because of their employment situation, loss of their provider family member, inadequate insurance, or distance to available providers. To address the needs of our Spanish-speaking families (10% of the people we serve), we have intake, peer support, and group support services available in Spanish.  Over 88% of our annual budget is spent directly on program funding.

What’s truly special about the services our organization offers is that, unlike traditional grief support programs, our peer-to-peer support model allows our Caring Guides to work with individuals and families when they need it most: in the evenings, on weekends or whenever needed.  Our Caring Guides are just a phone call and/or text message away.  Taylor’s Gift has created a compassionate source of hope so that donor families never have to grieve their loss alone.

Now through May 15th, when you donate money to our organization through the Communities Foundation of North Texas, your donation is matched 100%.  We're so excited to be a part of this great event.  Can you help?