You’re invited to celebrate 40 years of Bellis with us on May 2, between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. We’ll recognize our founding mothers and our artists, enjoy refreshments and have a brief program. Made possible by our generous sponsors and supporters.

For 40 years, Bellis has been a home for stories around adoption and foster care, and more recently, stories around mothers who experienced termination or transfer of parental rights. We have provided a safe space to be open and vulnerable with others who also understand. It’s important work and we are thrilled to celebrate it all this summer. With three special events, we hope to connect with the entire Bellis community and friends, including our founders’ families, artists, volunteers and donors. Join us!

This summer, Bellis will celebrate 40 years of work. Four decades of offering love, compassion, support and education for adoption—whether by intention or by circumstance. It is work that has evolved to meet the needs of the time. What began in 1983 as education and support for birth mothers, expanded to community outreach and monthly gatherings for those with adoption connections, to birth mother retreats, and to grief support for mothers who have lost their legal parental rights. Mothers who need someone to understand and welcome them.

Photo by Khadeeja Yasser on Unsplash

Bellis Executive Director Jenny Eldredge reflects on daisies in summertime, and the ways that daisies and sunflowers symbolize the Bellis community. Bellis is a botanical term, and like these sunny and sturdy flowers, folks with adoption and foster care experiences often feel brighter and stronger in groups compared to standing alone.

(Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash)

When we help others who are in pain and feel hopeless, we strengthen their sense of wellbeing, plus their families’ and our communities’ wellbeing. To offer hope to someone is to soften their anguish. They stop having nightmares.

Women at the crossroads of grief, trauma, addiction and mental health challenges are finding hope at Bellis. We are pioneers in support for women whose children are parented by others – the only ones in the country to offer this expertise. Now in year two of this program, we invite you to invest in this important work.

Bellis is a pioneer in this specialized grief support work. Our expert-led, peer-based model is called Stronger Together, and it works.

When we listen with intention, we understand – without a doubt – that it’s beyond anyone’s ability or wisdom to put stories of adoption or foster care into neat categories to prove a point. We understand that to share these personal stories is very vulnerable and brave work.

At Bellis, we won’t deny their truths or tell them they just don’t understand what really happened to them. Would you?

An unsettling reality is that hundreds of Minnesota women are left without emotional support related to the fact that someone else will parent their children. That’s why, this spring, we will begin offering our Stronger Together peer-based support program to women who have lost custody of their children after intervention by child protection services.