The Brandon Tolson Foundation (BTF) mission is to provide support families who have experienced the sudden and tragic loss of a child. Born out of the loss of their son Brandon, the Foundation, led by Jon & Candi Tolson, is committed to helping other unprepared families through the indescribable pain and agonizing process of a child’s death. We often connect with our families at the onset of their loss to assist with lost wages and handle the business aspect of death for them by working with the funeral home and cemetery directly to help cover the cost of laying their child to rest; often in full. We offer GoFundMe campaign management without fees, providing them with gross dollars collected to be utilized towards the funeral costs. Additionally we support our families with grief counseling, a monthly grief support call, events throughout the year, a private Facebook page just for our parents and more.

The vision of the Brandon Tolson Foundation is to be the organization that parents can lean on after

Goal One: Parent events is an ongoing focus. We are planning a Mother’s Day gathering in May, a Father’s Day gathering in June and our annual Un-Holiday party in December with others in the works.

Goal Two: Our Vilomah Companion Program is where an existing BTF parent is assigned to a new one becoming their companion and part of their support system through their process of loss.

Goal Three: Connecting with funeral homes so that when a client of child loss presents themselves, they will know to reach out to us to connect us with the parents and work with us to handle the financial burden.

Brandon passed away at the age of 20. At the time, he had a core group of friends that remain solid today. One goal at our onset and still today is to bring those friends into the fold of being involved and leading our organization. One of those is a Board member who came on board at the beginning of our creation and now is part of our social posting strategy and is our lead graphic designer. Another, recently joined our Board as our Treasurer. He is a CPA with experience working with non-profits. As this group are now all accomplished adults, we continue to find ways to bring them on board to become more involved in what we do. We will be looking at formal training and leadership forums for our Board to attend to continue to their growth and capabilities to grow our organization.

BTF has grown tremendously over the past year with an increase in the number of families we have supported by 50%. We made changes at our board level with bringing on board a new Treasurer who is a CPA and brings his vast non-profit experience to our organization. This moved our then Treasurer to becoming our Executive Director given she was managing the organization at the highest level already. We have solidified our intake process of new parents with close connections to funeral homes to manage that process for our parents together. Last year, we were able to open back up with our in person events with continued increase attendance. Two of those events sold out this year, one within 30 days and one within 48 hours. This is a testament to the amazing events we host and the tremendous growth of BTF in the community.