Small Business Spotlight - October 2024: On Angels' Wings
Company Name: On Angels’ Wings
Person in Charge: Michelle L. Cramer, Founder/Executive Director
Year founded: 2013
Tell us about the history of your business:
On Angels’ Wings was founded in July 2013 in an effort to fill an often overlooked need in the Springfield community to support families facing the unimaginable: the (potential) loss of a child. The organization completed 41 free professional photo sessions for such families in its first full year and launched many support events to help our families connect, including the Making Memories Day carnival, which has been held every year since inception. In 2020, two board members were certified in the Grief Recovery Method in order to expand our support services by offering a dedicated 8-week grief recovery program to our recipients (and the communities we serve) free of charge. By 2022, the organization was serving the entire state of Missouri and completed 267 sessions in the state. The organization then saw a 70% increase in sessions for 2023, completing 453 photo sessions; 14 of those were in the organization’s first out-of-state chapters that launched that year in Oklahoma City and Minneapolis. In 2024, OAW added two more out-of-state chapters in Evansville, Indiana and Central Illinois. We were recognized this year at SBJ’s Nonprofit Excellence awards as one of the top three small nonprofits in Southwest Missouri.
Describe the services your organization provides and what makes you unique:
For more than a decade, On Angels’ Wings (OAW) has provided unduplicated and compassionate services throughout Missouri. OAW’s mission is to support the mental health and wellness of families whose child has a terminal-risk diagnosis or who have lost a child at birth - regardless of race, ethnicity, class status, religion, or orientation - through Therapeutic Photography and ongoing support services, all free of charge. Families first encounter OAW through its Therapeutic Photography program, and ongoing mental health, wellness, and grief recovery support are provided indefinitely for the household family. Therapeutic photography is designed to help families document the love they have for their child, regardless of how short that child’s life is. The photos help families process difficult emotions and have been reported to help with healing in the event of a loss. They also help families share their unique story and their medically-fragile child’s individual personalities through artistic expression. OAW remains committed to ensuring children facing medical challenges, their siblings, and loved ones feel seen, cared for, and supported during the entirety of their health and grief journeys.
There are other organizations available that provide free images for families, but they typically focus on only one type of situation (only stillbirth, only babies in the NICU, only children with cancer). On Angels’ wings provides our services to families from maternity to the child’s 18th year, with any medical condition that puts the child’s life at risk, or a stillbirth loss, being the only qualifiers. Additionally, we have yet to discover any organization that does both free professional photography and offers ongoing support services, including a dedicated grief recovery program.
Tell us something people might not know about your organization:
We find that people are not aware of how frequently our services are needed – 1 in 175 pregnancies ends in stillbirth, which the CDC defines as a loss at 20 weeks gestation or after, and the families we specifically serve in about a third of the sessions we provide each year.
Our organization is also advocating for change on a grander scale. We are committed to the years long process of trying to get a statewide bereavement leave policy enacted in Missouri, and have started advocating for such at the state Capitol this year. We’re also determined to change the way society handles someone grieving tremendous loss in any way that we can.
What is the biggest challenge facing your organization now, and how are you working to overcome that challenge?
One of our biggest challenges is helping people who have never experienced the loss of a child, or caring 24/7 for a medically-fragile child, understand the importance of the services we provide. The families we serve are an often overlooked part of our community, with little to no support services available to them on a grander scale. Because it is so hard for someone that has never been through such a loss to comprehend it, we’ve struggled to get donors and funders to understand the importance of our work. This year we’ve worked very hard to address this issue by utilizing a grant to update our website for the first time in 8 years, another grant for a full evaluation and revamping of our messaging, and hiring a marketing firm to aid us in getting that message out to the masses more effectively.
What is the best business advice you’ve ever been given?
It’s all about connection. You must have systems for maintaining connection with your donors (clients in the case of a B2C or B2B company) in order to be successful in the long term.
