Today we’d like to introduce you to Mothers of Held Angels.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Our story from our “About” page on our website best sums up how we started and how the mission of MOHA began.
Three moms, Brittany Kemp, Anna Noto, and Hollyn Keith, came together in fellowship to support one another through the loss of their babies, Eden Grace, Lillian Belle, and James ‘Carter.’ In sharing their babies’ stories, they realized that there was an obvious need for a special kind of bereavement care, one starting from the moment a woman finds out that she has lost her baby. With this, the dream of Mothers of Held Angels came to light. MOHA is a place for women to share experience-based advice, provide supportive resources, and to give a “face” to the other side of the darkness by showing other loss moms that “you are not alone here”.
Mothers of Held Angels is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Christian fundamentals and faith guide our vision. Compassion, empathy, and understanding are at the core of our values.
At MOHA we believe every bereaved family deserves a standard of bereavement care we call “The MOHA Angel Experience,” which includes:
(1) TIME with their baby and to be given access to the ‘Flexmort CuddleCot’, a cooling blanket bereavement device which will extend the amount of time, often days, a family has with their baby to bond and make memories.
(2) Access to a trained volunteer, also a bereaved mother, known as a ‘MOHA Angel Ambassador’ to EMPOWER a bereaved family to create healthy memories with their held angel.
(3) A ‘MOHA Angel Box’ to provide tools and resources in the hospital that help create healthy MEMORIES for bereaved families to bond with their baby during their limited time together.
The MOHA CoFounders, board, volunteers, and Angel Ambassador Team also dedicate their time to providing bereavement education in-services to partnered hospitals, healthcare staff, and students on how to best support bereaved families immediately following their loss and empower them to make healthy memories with their baby while in the hospital.
The death of a baby and the trauma surrounding this unique type of loss is an unimaginable and indescribable type of pain. MOHA raises public awareness of stillbirth and neonatal loss through our MOHA Mom’s Network, The MOHA Podcast Channel, and partnerships with other community organizations. We host a monthly “Coffee and Conversation” at Humble Grounds Coffeehouse in Fulshear for moms of loss to gather in fellowship and discuss life after loss. The MOHA Podcast channel has 3 seasons of raw conversations about loss with experts, community leaders, and families of loss weighing in. Families and hospitals can access all of our resources through our website and find what best fits their needs in the moment.
This ministry is only made possible through donations and volunteer support. The funds raised for MOHA go directly back into our mission.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Our organization has grown organically and substantially since our inception in late October 2021. We thought we would simply be a small, loss-support group for mothers on the west side of Houston, but quickly realized there was a greater need for a standard of bereavement care starting the moment the family finds out their baby is no longer living.
We quickly formed our mission statement and started using our own experiences of loss to meet that need and raise awareness.
In December of 2021, we started our first hospital partnership at Houston Methodist Sugarland with their amazing L&D bereavement team and leadership. We met our first family of loss at that same time and were able to provide them with a MOHA Angel Box assist them in using the hospital’s CuddleCot (the device was donated by Brittany Kemp’s coworkers in honor of her daughter Eden Grace), and empower them to embrace their time with their daughter to make as many memories as possible during their short time with her. This first family has played a pivotal role in our growth and development through the last 2.5 years and are a part of the MOHA Team to this day.
It can be challenging to get that first meeting in front of hospital and clinical executives and administrators to explain what our mission is and exactly what our organization is offering to donate and do for their families of loss. But once we are able to get in front of them, face-to-face, with all of our offered tools and resources out on the table for them to see and touch, things tend to move quickly from there. The three of us are able to speak from our own experiences of loss, giving them a real-life look into what bereavement care in the hospital setting should look like.
To date, nearly 200 MOHA Angel Boxes and 6 CuddleCots have been donated. MOHA has partnered with 12 Houston area hospitals, birth centers, and nursing school programs to bring the MOHA Angel experience to their bereaved families, with the most recent being one of the nation’s largest hospitals, Harris Health Ben Taub Hospital in April of this year. This spring, we hosted our first Bereavement Care Retreat, where over 20 volunteer Angel Ambassadors and healthcare staff came together to take a deep dive into caring for families of loss while in the hospital, a precursor to our planned Bereavement Care Symposium in the fall for nursing staff and hospital bereavement teams.
While the three of us built MOHA’s mission together, there is no way we could have ever come this far this fast without our huge support network. Our own family and friends, The CuddleCot Team, our community supporters, volunteers, and MOHA families have been the driving force in being able to keep up with the demand and rapid growth. Any time we call on them, they have been there to pack Angel boxes, drop off resources, make phone calls, set up meetings, and raise funds. Many have shared their own homes and places of business with us just to help us power forward in our mission.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Brittany and Hollyn (myself) are nurses by trade, and Anna is an educator, so we all complement each other very nicely when it comes to being able to connect and engage with families, hospital staff, and community partners about our mission and cause awareness. We are also moms to living children, wives, run households, have careers, and are active within our communities outside of MOHA. While the death of a baby changes you in insurmountable ways forever, we feel it’s important for moms who are experiencing the loss of their baby to see that other moms of loss have survived this horrific reality. There is life after loss, and we are here to help them get there while preserving the memory of their beloved baby.
What matters most to you? Why?
From day one, the three of us sat at a table together, grabbed hands, and agreed that if we help one mom not feel alone on this journey, just one, then it’s all worth it. We don’t want a single mother to feel isolated in her grief and heartbreak. That’s our whole purpose: to empower moms and families, validate their feelings, hear their experiences, and sit with them as they share their baby’s name and story.
Holding your deceased baby in your arms is so surreal and unfathomable until it happens, and no one truly understands what it does to your entire existence unless you’ve been through it yourself. It’s a tragic bond and tie we all instantly have to one another. We are a network, a community, supporting one another through the death of our babies.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.MOHAnetwork.org
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/mothersofheldangels/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/MOHAnetwork/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mothers-of-held-angels/
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/@mohanetwork123
- Other: https://e.givesmart.com/events/Bvz/
Image Credits
Mike Huynh
Anna Noto
