“Be Butterfly Beautiful”

Our Mission at Butterfly Backpacks:

If we can save just one through our message, it will all be worth it. Butterfly Backpacks assembles and hand delivers backpacks full of toiletries and encouraging notes and letters to the women at The Healing Place. It is our hope that the women going through addiction recovery will see just how much they are loved when they open the backpack and see all the toiletry items individually packaged with care. As they dig deeper in the backpack each girl will read Maegan’s story, letters from her younger brother and mom, and see the beautiful hand drawn butterflies made by our friend with Down Syndrome, Jill. Jill says, “each butterfly is exactly as it should be.” These women are exactly on the journey of healing they need to be and they need to know someone is cheering them on in their very difficult battle. Butterfly Backpacks is the family that will partner with The Healing Place to love and support each woman through recovery. We have donated over 4000 Backpacks to The Healing Place! Every dollar donated goes directly to providing another Backpack and saving another life.

Click the Donate button to help us provide Backpacks:

In Memory of Maegan Mills:

Butterfly Backpacks was born to honor the memory of Maegan Mills.  On February 9, 2014, just 18 days shy of her 23 birthday, “Our beautiful butterfly floated into God’s hands.” Maegan was a beautiful, loving and compassionate soul that loved serving others through her nursing degree. Outwardly, she wanted to help others but inwardly she battled a tough addiction. She was the strongest fighter we have ever known. She came out of the Healing Place and made a full turn around with her life. She got accepted into a very competitive nursing degree at the University of Louisville. All it took was one slip up for the drugs to take her life. Tina, her mother, wanted to use her grief to prevent any parent from ever again having to bury their child because of the struggle from addiction. She says, “We want to help those who she would want to help because that was her calling.” The inspiration for Butterfly Backpacks came from a happy memory of Maegan at The Healing Place. Her family had gone to visit her and took Maegan and some of her new found friends to a local Wal-Mart to buy supplies. Most of the girls come to the program with only the clothes on their backs.  Maegan said she needed basic toiletries and a backpack to carry them around in. It would give her something of her own in a place where she would fight her deepest battles. Tina decided to create these backpacks and deliver them by hand to the women at the Healing Place as an encouragement to stay the course of the program. Creating Butterfly Backpacks as a tribute to Maegan was a perfect Christmas gift from her family and she could use any money she would have spent on Maegan’s birthdays to contribute to the cause. We can’t give to her but we can give to them. On Maegan’s birthday each year, the family also brings butterfly cupcakes. Each backpack contains a signed letter from her little brother to inspire a new life like the transition of a butterfly. Maegan loved butterflies and this is her quote, “I THINK BUTTERFLIES ARE THE BEST EXAMPLE AS TO HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE… THEY ALWAYS FLY FREE WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT…AND WHENEVER THEY GET KNOCKED DOWN BY A LITTLE RAIN…THEY DRY OFF…AND GET BACK UP FLYING FREELY ONE AGAIN…AS IF NOTHING WAS EVER IN THEIR WAY.”