A foundation committed to honoring the life of Sidney Kay, through programming, fundraising and charitable donations with a focus on adolescent mental health.
Thanks to all of you that have donated to the Sidney Kay Foundation, we are able to sponsor this illuminating seminar, free and open to the entire community. Light must be shed on this dark subject . https://www.firstrespondercoaching.com/
Last week, our friends and family gathered together to join 1,196 other participants in the AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), “Out of the Darkness” community walk at the beautiful Botanical Gardens, here in Memphis, Tennessee. Our team “Sidney’s Soldiers” raised, $1,347 of the $55,677.83 donations for the AFSP’s mission to save lives and bring hope to those affected by suicide.
I want to personally thank all those who donated, and walked with us for this very personal and meaningful cause. Thank you to Monica Litt, Dan Grabel, Paula Miller, Jodie Faber, Rob, Amy, Gordon, and Millie Brode, Blair Jones, Josh, Rachel and Alaina Feinman, Julia Wood and Kevin James, Jennifer and Isaac Bear, Carolina Melul, Jaynie Judaken, Scott, Shelly, and Eli Ostrow, Dan, Keri, Sarah and Micah Unowsky, Greg, Darci, Anna, John, Charlie, and Mary Caesar, Pat and Barb Caesar, Nadine Golden, Lauren and Jillian Tochner, Melinda Cassius, Michael and Samantha Schmidt, Alex, Lennox and Jullien LeVine Miller, Isabella Gadberry, Stephanie and Jeremy Weiser and kids, Susan and Paul Stein, the Newstok family, Mindy Cooper Tramel, the Shapiro Family, The Sidney Kay Foundation and Beverly Kay. We could not have done this without your support. With this being our first walk, I didn’t know what to expect, it ended up being a beautiful tribute to all those affected by suicide, here in the Mid-South.
“Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend, together we walk in the path of Hashem.”
-Jewish children’s song
Today, August 11, 2018, would have been Sidney’s 15th birthday. It has been over 5 months since Sidney passed away. As a tribute to his life, many of y’all, his friends, family members and people in our communities made generous donations to the Sidney Kay Fund at the Memphis Jewish Foundation. Jeff and I established this fund because so many people wanted to help, but at the time, we did not have the mental ability to give these these kind financial gestures the attention they deserved.
For the last several months, thanking everybody for your kindness and putting the donations to good use, has been top of mind for both me and Jeff. While this is important to us, it has taken a backseat to our family’s move from Minnetonka, back home to Memphis. Now that we are almost settled in, we wanted to use Sidney’s birthday as an opportunity to do just that. So many of you were so helpful in so many ways and all of your love and support continues to help our entire family get through Sidney’s terrible tragedy. As you can all imagine, the pain of losing our oldest son is never going to go away, but hopefully keeping his memory alive, while helping other adolescents, in need, will continue to give us the strength that we need to cope.
We have received many great suggestions of worthy organizations to support and projects to work on, but we still have not determined how and where we are going to use the resources of Sidney’s fund. Today’s goal was simply to thank everyone and to create a platform to allow anyone who is interested to follow the mitzvot that Sidney’s memory produces. We set up a Facebook and Instagram account, so please” like” and ” follow ” them so you can see our feeds. Our intent is to post blog updates on the activities of the Sidney Kay Foundation, as well as relevant news articles and information. Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts, we look forward to honoring Sidney’s memory in a very big way.
Love,
Jeff and Larissa