The Angel Fund was born in 2000 by Shelly and Joe Cogguillo after the loss of their three babies. In 2003, Cathy Fritea (author of  "Tiny Hands Changes the World") joined Shelly to carry out the mission of the Angel Fund. Cathy experienced a full-term stillbirth in March 1998, and a miscarriage in November 1998.

The Angel Fund Mission - To Provide a comforting, informative safe place for bereaved parents to keep the memory of their baby alive.

How the Angel Fund helps grieving families heal from the loss of a baby; When the anticipated rapture of a child's birth inverts into the debilitating anguish of mourning a baby stillborn or a baby who dies in infancy, the desolation is all too often shrouded in silence. Loving couples on otherwise sure footing sometimes cannot find the words. Family and friends fear offending with words that miss or worse. The mother's child, whom she named and came to know through the months of their being one and yet not one, is someone she can never forget. There are memories. There was a relationship, if only briefly. The mother gave birth and the child was born.

Shelly Cogguillo and her husband Joe are intimately acquainted with the entire wash cycle of emotions that comes with such an unspeakable loss.

On June 16, 1997, Joe and Shelly Cogguillo's second baby, Oliver, was born.

Shelly Cogguillo, Cathy Fritea, & Jocelyn Maminta (News Channel 8)

Shelly's story; "Oliver died seven weeks later of a heart defect that was not detected during pregnancy. On what would have been Oliver's first birthday, Joe and I learned that the baby I was carrying had died. Lilla was born still on June 17, 1998. Joe chose to see Lilla. I couldn't. I met my daughter for the first when I opened a 'memory box' my nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital gave us before we left the hospital. The box contained Lilla's blanket, little pink hat, handprints and footprints, pictures of her, and our hospital bracelets. She was so tiny and so easy to love. I carried her little hat around with me for days."

The "memory box" was something the knowing nurses prepared on their own and out of their own pockets. The memory boxes also contained a copy of the book Empty Cradle, Broken Heart that gives advice and comfort to grieving parents. Following a miscarriage in 1999, and personally knowing how helpful these keepsakes were, Shelly and Joe established the Angel Fund in 2000 to support the nurse's good work at Yale-New Haven Hospital, CT.

In 2003, the Cogguillo's launched Angel Fund, Inc., as a component fund of The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven in CT, to raise funds to offer a Memory Box program to hospitals throughout the state.

The Angel Fund advocates for research in the area of perinatal bereavement and provides uniquely designed and thoughtfully prepared Memory Boxes personalized for each mourning mother and family in participating hospitals. Items include a unique journal and memory book, exclusive footprints pin with poem "Garden in My Heart," Books-"Empty Cradle, Broken Heart and "Tiny Hands Change the World, bereavement information brochures, a hand-quilted blanket and more.

Accomplishments
To date golf tournament proceeds have:

• Established $40,000 endowment at YNHCH (90% of goal within 3 years) to fund Memory Box program in perpetuity.
• Purchased initial supplies to support annual losses approximating 60 per year.
• Distributed 100 filled memory boxes and digital cameras to Hospital of Saint Raphael; Griffin Hospital and Saint Mary's Hospital in Connecticut.