Gilda’s Club Louisville Mission: to provide a free, non-residential place where men, women and children with cancer, along with their families and friends, join with others to build essential social and emotional support.

Letter from Our President & CEO

The first time I ever heard “Gilda’s Club,” I was living in Milwaukee. I had gone there by air ambulance with my then 5 year old daughter, only to be told she probably had 4 weeks to live. But the day I entered Gilda’s Club was two years after that. I was getting a tour and wishing this wonderful resource had been there for us. My daughter had gone into remission and, after 27 months of chemotherapy, we left Milwaukee to return home to Louisville. So I never saw that Club with members in it.

I had not been in Louisville long before I heard a Gilda’s Club was coming here. I still didn’t really know what a Gilda’s Club was. I understood the concept in theory, but I really didn’t know what it was all about. Not really. I knew it was going to be a wonderful resource for families like mine and I wanted to be a part of it, but in all honesty I didn’t quite “get it.” Not fully.

After coming to work here in March, I had the opportunity to visit a Gilda’s Club in Grand Rapids. Stepping inside those doors on a chilly and busy night, a colleague stopped me and said, “Listen. This what a Gilda’s Club sounds like.”

I returned to Louisville, where our Gilda’s Club was still under renovation. I did tours almost daily before there were even walls and with Grand Rapids in mind, I began to try to paint the picture of what a real Gilda’s Club was, what ours would soon become. I described the things that would come. “There will be a piano over here,” “A pool table there,” “A puppet theatre here,” “comfy furniture there.”  One day doing a tour after those things had arrived, I realized all that was missing were the people and I worried, “Will they really come?”

I will never forget the first night people living with cancer came to Gilda’s Club. It was a physician lecture and it was much more than that, too. There were about 25 of us here and people began to share, to laugh, to tear up, laugh some more and give each other advice, encouragement, hope. It was beginning to look a lot like a Gilda’s Club.

Then we had our first support groups the following week. Our Program Director, Marlena Woodmansee and our Program Coordinator, Joe Ferry, came rushing into my office that night where two other staff members and I were working. It was about 9 p.m. and they were all smiles. They said, together, “It’s a Gilda’s Club!”

We had successfully facilitated our first social and emotional support offerings. And then more people came. Men, women, children, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. People with cancer, long-term cancer survivors, the people who loved them, and those who had lost a loved one to cancer.

Now, most every night it sounds like a Gilda’s Club. It looks like a Gilda’s Club. We’ve had yoga classes, art workshops, cooking classes, lectures, pot-luck dinners, game nights, and more. We have on a couple of occasions needed to scoot people out the door so the cleaning staff could do their work at 10 p.m. So it is, indeed, a Gilda’s Club—a cancer support community unlike any other, where no one need go through a cancer journey alone.

Come and join us! We’d love to have you.

Karen Morrison,
President/CEO