Angel Gowns Project Turns Donated Wedding Dresses into Infant Burial Gowns

A volunteer project helps families cope with the terrible loss of a child. The Angel Gowns Project turns old wedding dresses into beautiful burial dresses for newborns.

NICU Helping Hands

The program is part of the NICU Helping Hands organization.

NICU is the acronym for a neonatal intensive care unit. It’s where newborn babies with serious medical conditions go for treatment.

Project NICU Helping Hands is a nonprofit organization that provides support and practical help to families who have a child in a NICU unit.

Loss and Healing

Some babies don’t make it out of the NICU. For these families, the joy having a child is quickly followed by the pain and loss of bereavement.

The Angel Gowns project ensures every family can receive a beautiful handmade garment to bury their child in.

How It Works

The Angel Gowns volunteers take donated wedding dresses and turn them into burial garments. Each dress can become about 10 little gowns.

The project now has a warehouse full of old wedding dresses. More than 500 volunteers across the country work to create the Angel Gowns.

Donations and Dresses

The project asks for a monetary donation with each dress. The donations pay for the work of shipping the gowns to volunteers and then shipping the finished baby dresses to the parents.

Women who don’t have a dress to donate can “sponsor a dress” for a woman who has a dress but can’t afford the $100 monetary donation.

Angel Gowns International

The program now operates internationally. The international program is based in Guatemala, where the program pays indigenous women to sew the dresses. Many of these women live in poverty, and the program helps them earn money and learn skills while helping other women.

Donations to the international program pay for workshops, training programs and education for the seamstresses. Project NICU Helping Hands is hoping to set up similar programs in other countries.

Honoring Precious Lives

Lisa Grubbs, founder and president of Project NICU Helping Hands, writes, “Whether a family loses a child through miscarriage, during delivery or after delivery, each loss matters and affects a family in a profound way. Our organization believes that every life matters and should be honored, no matter how brief that life may be.”

If you’re interested in donating, you can do it through the organization’s Facebook page.

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