UNC Asheville’s Letters of Love club sends hand decorated cards to local hospitals to lift the spirits of children battling long-term illness.
“It’s beneficial to have the club on a small campus like UNCA because a lot of the clubs at our school are focused on bettering the community. I love working with children, so I thought this was a good opportunity to bring something involving children to our campus,” said Bee Brody, a junior and co-president of the Letters of Love club.
The club is a small chapter of the global nonprofit Letters of Love club, founded by Grace Berbig in 2018. Berbig started the club at Orono High School, Minnesota, her junior year as a way to make cards with her friends and send them to local children’s hospitals and to honor her mom who tragically lost her battle with leukemia when Berbig was 10 years old. She and her sister would write cards constantly during the treatment process and her mom became known for always having drawings taped over her hospital rooms which made everyone smile, according to Berbig.
“After she passed away, I remember my dad sitting me and my sisters down and telling us this is our responsibility to turn something good out of this horrible thing that happened to us,” Berbig said. “We have to live in a way that allows our mom’s love and light and joy to live through us.”
At the end of Berbig’s junior year, Letters of Love was the biggest club at Orono High, with 200 people attending every meeting. Letters of Love started expanding to other clubs in Minnesota as other schools connected to the message and wanted to get involved, before becoming a registered nonprofit organization in 2020. The club has sent more than 500,000 letters to date, according to Marta Hill, co-director of operations and head of club development at Letters of Love.
“We’re now up to 315 clubs in 42 states across the country. We’ve received cards from 22 countries at least, and it’s been amazing to watch it grow and watch Grace lead the growth of the organization,” Hill said.
The Letter of Love club at UNCA is free to join, which is part of the greater mission of the club to be accessible and easy to participate in no matter where you are in the world, according to Hill.
“When I started the club, it was so important to me to show young people that you can make a real difference in our world without money. You can make a true difference in people’s lives with small acts of kindness and with something as simple as a pen and paper,” Berbig said.
UNCA students only have to bring themselves, their kindness and their creativity to club meetings, as coloring materials are already provided. Having a space to be creative and bring out your inner kid is important as an adult, especially knowing it’s going to make such a big positive impact on a little kid who’s going through a really tough time, according to Berbig.
“You don’t really go to these meetings and donate your time to making cards for kids with cancer unless you have a kind heart and you’re a kind person. It’s bringing together this whole group of people who want to donate their time to such a beautiful cause and it also brings the most amazing people into your life which is a really cool part of it as well,” Berbig said.
