A Message from Our Founder

The Michelle Kuri Foundation, named after my daughter to honor her memory, has been created to empower the lives of nonverbal/nonambulatory individuals and their families through education. For all of those families like ours and individuals like my daughter, Michelle, we strive to help the families ameliorate their worries and the suffering of their loved one by offering information, support, and compassion.

Our education program is designed to enhance the caregivers’ innate knowledge with more information about the condition of their loved one and to teach them about ways to deal with compassionate fatigue. The Foundation’s aims are to help decrease human suffering and increase human dignity for all by creating awareness regarding this population to among healthcare and healthcare service providers so they may become more empathetic to these families and their loved ones.

The Foundation also seeks to educate society to be more accepting of this population and to understand the struggles these families go through, especially since many feel left out by friends and other family members. Many people believe that the best solution is to put our children and adult children, spouses, or loved ones in an institution so that their limited existence is not a burden on the rest of the family. However, as with much good intention as that advice may be, people whose lives have not been touched by a nonverbal/nonambulatory loved one do not understand what it is like to be in the caregiver’s shoes.

I might appear excited for any little progress that the foundation achieves and I might appear strong, but at the end of the day, as a mother, I am still grieving for my daughter. I am still fragile and sensitive in this new world, a world without Michelle. However, my incentive to continue moving forward is motivated by knowing that we, the MKF Foundation, can help prevent another child or adult from living and dying with pain and keep another family from experiencing the added grief of feeling helpless.

Elisheva Placeres Nawrocik, PhD