Teen director’s nonprofit, ‘Blanketed With Love,’ has made 4,200 fleece wraps

Farmington Hills — Attending Mercy High School in Farmington Hills runs in the family for junior Lilly Blake, so it just makes sense that serving the community runs in the family, too.

Blake, whose older sisters Sarah and Maggie graduated from Mercy, is following in her sisters’ footsteps in more ways than one, as she currently directs a nonprofit organization called “Blanketed With Love,” which hand-makes and distributes colorful fleece blankets for those in need.

The idea started several years ago, Blake said.

“(Sarah) and one of my cousins were making blankets for my grandma for Christmas,” she said. Because their home in Grosse Pointe Farms is “just three miles from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Detroit,” Sarah and their cousin, Patty Battersey, “wanted to do something in our community.”

It occurred to them that fleece blankets, which are made easily with two large sheets of fleece and hand-tied, could be quickly assembled and donated to local charities.

The idea took off, and with help from the sisters’ mom, Anne, the 501(c)3 nonprofit, “Blanketed With Love,” was born in 2008.

“When Sarah graduated, my sister Maggie was going to be a sophomore, so her sophomore year she took on the project,” said Lilly Blake. “When Maggie graduated I took it on.”

Today, Blanketed With Love holds blanket-making events with friends and neighbors to mass-produce the soft blankets, including an event at Shrine Catholic Grade School in Royal Oak on Jan. 10.

“Altogether we’ve made around 4,200 blankets,” Blake said.

In 2013, a couple weeks before Christmas, Most Holy Trinity Parish in Detroit joined with the nonprofit to hold a party for 500 children living below the poverty line.

“There was cookie decorating, a great big meal, they got a big bag of toys,” Blake said. “That year they also got a blanket” — one of 500 that Blanketed With Love volunteers had churned out several months before.

“The kids would walk up and take their blankets, (saying) ‘We get to take this home? This is ours?’” Blake remembered.

Because they took on the 500-blanket project in August and started assembling the blankets around the end of September, the project required a speedy turnaround. But with help from friends, as well as children from St. Paul on the Lake in Grosse Pointe Farms, the project was finished.

Blake said St. Paul’s youth group, as well as a group of senior citizens, have contributed to Blanketed With Love, and even her own grandparents, in Cincinnati, “carry out the project at their retirement home.”

She estimated that her grandparents and their neighbors have probably made “a thousand blankets on their own.”

During Catholic Schools Week, “there’s always a table” at Mercy High School, Blake said, which is piled with fleece, so that “in any off time you have, you can make a blanket.”

“Last year we made about 100,” she added.

Cheryl Kreger, president of Mercy High School, told The Michigan Catholic that the Blanketed With Love project is “totally student-initiated.”

“Service is built into the Mercy education — we’re very dedicated to social justice causes and the unmet needs that different populations have,” Kreger said.

Because Blake is a junior and the youngest of the sisters, she said she doesn’t known what will happen to the nonprofit when she graduates and goes to college.

“If we find some other willing and excited kid to take the project, we’d be happy to pass it onto them,” Blake said.

Otherwise, “we’ve done a lot of great work” and she is OK with the organization concluding upon her graduation.