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There’s no roadmap when it comes to grief.
In November 1993, Nicole Marie Larson, Ken Larson’s second child, was born with underdeveloped lungs. She passed away in the NICU that same day.
“We knew that there were some issues with Nicole, but we didn’t know that she wouldn’t make it,” says Larson, an Edina Realty agent in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minn.
“That moment broke me in a way I never thought I could be broken,” he says. “But it also planted the seed for something bigger than grief—something rooted in love, community, and the hope that no parent would have to walk through that darkness alone.”
Larson decided to start something unique apart from other national children’s fundraising organizations—something that would rally his neighbors to raise local dollars to help local kids. And he wanted to do it, to honor Nicole.
So, in 2006, Larson, who had previously worked as a dentist for 30 years, started the Northern Lights Foundation.
“I could tell you how to do a root canal blindfolded, but I couldn’t tell you how to start a 501(c)(3),” Larson recalls. “Though our daughter was with us for just one precious day, her impact isn’t measured by time, but by the deep love and inspiration she brought into our lives. Her spirit has been the driving force behind the compassion and hope we strive to bring to other families.”
19 Years of Giving Parents Hope
Larson began working quickly, assembling a board and gifting his first grant to a family just months later.
The Northern Lights Foundation now provides financial grants to local families who have children facing life-threatening illnesses. Depending on the need, sometimes a family is given multiple grants over the course of recovery. The money can be used for anything; there are no strings attached and no income limits.
It’s meant to be a cushion. Often one parent needs to quit their job to take on caregiving duties, and parents are shuttling to and from hospitals and hotels.
“They pay their mortgage with it, or they pay their car payment or grocery bills,” Larson says. “Whatever.”
In the nearly two decades since Larson took up the cause, he’s raised over $1.5 million dollars and provided grants to over 300 families with a child facing a life-threatening illness. But what Larson’s built by embracing these families goes far beyond a dollar figure.
Cade’s Story
Sliding into home base, 13-year-old Cade Slattengren had just made the winning run. His baseball team would be heading to the state championship.
“The whole team dogpiled on top of him,” Cade’s mom Christi recalls 11 years later. “It was so amazing.”
All too soon, that emotional height would come crashing down. “He came home, showered and showed us that he had lumps in his armpit area,” Slattengren says.
The results of a chest X-ray brought the news no parent is ever ready to hear.
“The first word out of the nurse’s mouth was, ‘the oncologist will be coming to visit you soon,’” Slattengren says. “We just stopped and processed that. ‘The oncologist? They think he has cancer!’”
The doctors would confirm it. T-cell lymphoblastic leukemia.
“In the course of less than a week, our life was turned upside down,” Slattengren says. “One of the most frightening and devastating pieces of news that we received is that with childhood leukemia, in boys specifically, the treatment is three years long…. Three years of chemotherapy and radiation and treatment. It’s terrifying.”
Despite fears of putting that much poison in her child’s body, Slattengren knew there was no available alternative to save Cade’s life. She stopped working. She stayed by Cade’s side day and night, rubbing his back, putting ice on his head.
What carried her family through was their community in Hermantown, Minn., cheering Cade with signs and wearing orange—the typical color of leukemia cancer ribbons—at a 5k he had been planning to run and at a local football game.
It was at a benefit event for Cade that Slattengren was first introduced to the Northern Lights Foundation.
“Ken came forward and said, the Northern Lights Foundation has learned about your family, and we want to help you,” she says. He explained they could use the check for anything they needed.
“I remember just giving Ken the biggest hug,” Slattengren says. “It was like the community—the larger Duluth community—just wrapping their arms around us.”
That’s a sentiment shared by Dr. Ross Perko, a pediatric oncologist at Essentia Health in Duluth, who treated Cade and serves on the foundation’s board.
“You can have the best insurance in the world, but it doesn’t put gas in your car, it doesn’t pay for hotel rooms, it doesn’t cover childcare,” Perko says. “So, what this is meant to do, is offset that little thing.” For grantees, the extra financial support means “that ‘I felt that there were people behind me, and that there’s a community behind me.’”
Even within the foundation, Larson built a community: Several of his board members are past grant recipients who became inspired to give back. His galas attract so many former parents and children in recovery that Perko calls it a “homecoming.”
Ken’s Impact
The Northern Lights Foundation has created a network of neighbors helping neighbors, and several of those neighbors—including the man who started it all—have walked a similar path to those they help.
“If somebody came up to Ken and said, ‘Ken, I want to donate $10 million to the Northern Lights Foundation,’ he would treat that individual the exact same way as he would treat the person that wants to give $100,” Perko says.
Perko recalls how Larson hand-delivered a check to a family who had been approved for a grant. “They were just kind of blown away” that the head of a foundation would do that, Perko says.
Cade Slattengren, who is now in remission and starting school in Duluth to become a physician’s assistant, has joined Christi to speak on behalf of the Northern Lights Foundation over the years.
And the charity keeps expanding. For example, Larson’s son Michael helped open a new chapter in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Larson hopes to bring on an executive director. Still, he has no plans to retire from the project that’s given him so much meaning, despite the personal emotions he feels bubble up when entering families’ worst days. Of course, some of the children don’t get better.
“We had [a former grant recipient]—a 22-year-old, just pass,” he says. “The celebration of life was just yesterday. Experiences like this are reminders of the difficult realities we face often.”
He adds, “It hurts, but it helps. Not only are we helping these families, but it’s also been a way for me to heal over the years. I could just stop and play golf for the rest of my life, but I don’t want to do that. I need to have a purpose, and this is my purpose, along with real estate now.”
The foundation’s Volunteer of the Year Award has been renamed to the Nicole Marie Larson Light of Hope Award, keeping her legacy of compassion alive, Larson says.
REALTOR® Kenneth Larson of Edina Realty, Minneapolis and Duluth, Minnesota, is founder of the Northern Lights Foundation.
