More than 1,000 families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will receive therapeutic teddy bears from The Comfort Cub to help them process the 25th anniversary of the tragedy.
The Comfort Cub is a nonprofit organization that provides weighted plush toys to help individuals cope with loss, trauma, grief, anxiety, illness and other challenges. The organization will travel to New York City ahead of the milestone anniversary on Friday, Sept. 11, to give Comfort Cubs to people who lost loved ones during the attacks. The distribution will take place during the VOICES 25th Anniversary NYC Symposium and Commemorative Luncheon.
The Comfort Cub founder Marcella Johnson told PEOPLE, “We have been working on this for the last couple of years.”
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Johnson said the effort began when “a friend of mine who lives in New Canaan, Conn., told me about the organization, Voices Center for Resilience (formerly known as the Voices of September 11th).”
“Some of her friends in her neighborhood helped to start the organization after losing a son and a husband in the Twin Towers,” she added. “We had offered to help in the past, and they suggested we join them for the 25th Anniversary, because they recognized the Comfort Cub as an important therapeutic tool to help with healing. It is such an honor to be included in this very special memorial day.”
“This Sept. 11, on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, we are so very grateful that The Comfort Cub organization will be joining us at the Voices Center for Resilience Symposium to distribute bears to family members who experienced the loss of a loved one that tragic day,” Mary Fetchet, executive director of Voices Center for Resilience, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.
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Johnson added, “25 years can never erase the absence of someone you love. Grief changes over time, but it does not simply disappear. It is an incredible honor to place a Comfort Cub into the arms of these families and remind them that their loss is remembered, their loved ones are remembered and they are not alone.”
Stuffed animals reportedly played a meaningful role in the recovery efforts following 9/11. In the initial months after the 2001 attacks, volunteers across the nation sent teddy bears to comfort grieving children.
The Comfort Cub has previously donated tens of thousands of stuffed animals to survivors of other tragedies, including the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012; the Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas in October 2017; and the Fourth of July parade shooting in Highland Park, Ill., in July 2022.