For over 20 years, E4E Relief has been steadfast in awarding disaster relief grants, serving our corporate partners and their employees around the world. In April 2020, we began a journey unlike any other in our organization’s history. In partnership with the New York Life and Cigna Foundations, we established the Brave of Heart Fund, a relief effort dedicated to providing charitable grants and emotional support services to families of the frontline healthcare workers, volunteers, and support staff whose lives were lost in the fight against COVID-19.

This summary delves into the impact of our founding donors, New York Life and Cigna, and the over 2,000 additional donations we received to provide relief to affected families. E4E Relief is deeply honored to steward this program and award relief grants at such an enormous scale.

As the leading provider of innovative philanthropic solutions that rapidly and effectively respond to crisis and hardships, we realized early on that disaster relief caused by a global pandemic required an approach that had to match the size and significance of this event: A healthcare crisis never seen nor experienced in our lifetimes.We weren’t sure of the exact approach, but together with our donors, we knew we needed to help. We did, and the end result was an incredible outpouring of support and love for our frontline healthcare workers and their families.

While our hearts break for these families, we have attempted to capture the sacrifices their loved ones made and their heroic commitment to do their jobs trying to save the lives of others – even in the toughest of circumstances. Collectively, our grantee families are linked to frontline healthcare workers that were primary wage earners and caretakers, parents and grandparents, children and siblings. Individually, they are souls now absent in our world – and whose memories we wish to honor via the Brave of Heart Fund.

They took care of us. They protected our families.

And so we took care of theirs.