Isn’t it Lovely When Love Shows Up? Special Guest: Angela Kennecke
“I didn’t have some kind of miracle after her death, but my miracle came in other people. Love kept showing up. People kept showing up to come by my side…to help me through things.”
Tracy and Rachel are honored to sit down with Emmy Award-winning journalist and devoted mother Angela Kennecke for a deeply moving conversation about her beautiful daughter Emily and the extraordinary light she brought to the world. A radiant light with the tender heart and sensitive spirit of an artist, Emily embraced and celebrated each day, until her life was tragically cut short by fentanyl poisoning. Motivated by her unending love for her daughter, Angela founded the Emily’s Hope Foundation, whose mission is to remove the stigma of substance use disorder through awareness, education, and prevention; and removing financial barriers for treatment and recovery. In addition to pledging $100,000 for adolescent treatment scholarships and $250,000 for adult treatment scholarships at the Sioux Falls-based Avera Addiction Care Center (with 150 people having received those scholarships to date), Emily’s Hope is also pioneering an education initiative for a K-12 prevention curriculum that focuses on the whole child and includes lesson plans, literature, and an animated series. With grace and empathy, Angela discusses the choice to remain open-hearted after unimaginable loss, her passion to replace judgment with compassion, how her gift of storytelling is both therapeutic personally, while also enabling others to fully realize human connections, and how consistently love has shown up in her life as her community surrounded her to carry on Emily’s legacy.
Episode Mentions:
Emily’s Hope Foundation Website: https://www.emilyshope.foundation/
Emily’s Hope Foundation Instagram: @emilyshope_
Emily’s Hope Foundation Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emilyshopefoundation
Award-winning investigative reporter and broadcast journalist Angela Kennecke has spent three decades keeping people informed on the evening news, including with her investigative reports, which have resulted in changes to laws. She was named a 2021 inductee to the South Dakota Hall of Fame.
In recent years, many of Angela’s stories focused on the growing opioid crisis. On the day her 21-year-old daughter, Emily, died of an overdose, Angela was working on a story on Good Samaritan Laws and overdose deaths.
Emily died of fentanyl poisoning. Angela has taken Emily’s story nationwide and even internationally. Angela speaks tirelessly about the issues surrounding opioid addiction, a parent’s frustration, and a sense of helplessness and tells it all from the perspective of a mother who has lost her child. Angela started a charity called “Emily’s Hope,” because she never gave up hope on her daughter and now wants to offer hope to other families struggling with addiction.
Angela believes when tragedy and setbacks strike the only thing you have control over is your response. Angela’s response to the loss of her beautiful and beloved daughter is to turn heartbreak into action by erasing the stigma surrounding addiction and advocate for more funding, better treatment, and more research and understanding of the disease claiming so many lives.