A few months before she passed away in her father’s arms after a tragic accident, Ellie Berg, who was just six, looked up at the Jumbotron during a CU Boulder women’s basketball game and saw herself on the screen. She smiled and said, “If I die, I’ll live forever because I was on TV.”
Thanks to Ellie’s parents, Josh and Carly Berg, Ellie’s memory will live on, but not because of her brief moment on the big screen. After her death last November, when a tree collapsed onto her while she was playing on a slackline in the backyard, they took their grief and pain and decided to channel it into something purposeful and lasting. They launched a foundation, the Be Like Ellie Foundation, inspired by the most obvious theme they could think of based on Ellie’s short time on the planet: spreading acts of kindness.
“She had this way of making every individual feel special,” said Carly, Ellie’s mother. “People would ask, ‘Is she like this with everyone?’ And she was. She would connect with them in such a way that they felt they were special and let them know how much they were appreciated. It’s a quality that I don’t think is learned; it’s just natural for her.”
Speaking to the Bergs about their daughter is like stepping into a movie of their lives that is all in the past tense. They describe her as having the maturity and presence of an old soul, sharing example after example to illustrate this. Like the way she moved around the room during an event to honor the Oct. 7 Israeli hostages, looking at the signs made for each one and noting their ages — pausing to tell her dad about the one who was just four months old — with calm stoicism. Or the way she would sing and make up songs, one so mature that, to her father, Josh, it felt like a legitimate love ballad. (The lyrics are now tattooed on his forearm.)
For Josh and Carly, who own a Boulder bookkeeping company together, starting the foundation and organizing its first benefit concert at the Fox Theatre on Sept. 21 is sometimes a helpful distraction from the grief. Other times, it is crushingly difficult.
“It’s so dark and so messy, and the one thing that’s helped us is to find reasons to continue living, reasons to go on despite the hardest thing happening,” Carly said. “This foundation is part of that. Knowing we’re here to spread Ellie gives us purpose beyond what we would’ve been able to do before. Nothing makes it easier.”
The Bergs said that for other parents grieving from a similar loss, community and purpose are essential.
“The concept of being under the covers by yourself, I can’t imagine that there’s anyone doing that and getting help from it,” Josh said.
With a mission of spreading acts of kindness, the Bergs are getting creative in figuring out how to make that happen. Their most recent initiative is offering microgrants to help people do kind things that might cost some money, like paying for a neighbor kid’s sports gear or covering a car ride to an appointment for someone without transportation. The goal is to provide small grants that will make someone smile.
“I went to Pearl Street the other day and handed out a dozen roses to people of all different shapes and colors,” Josh said. “Outside of one person who didn’t trust anything right now, which is okay, people said, ‘You made my day.’”
The Be Like Ellie Foundation has many ideas for brightening someone’s day and wants to bring those ideas into schools to get kids thinking along those lines.
“We want to educate people on how easy it is to be kind. All the things you’re taught are about what not to do, but you’re not getting any guidance on what to do,” Josh said.
The idea doesn’t seem grandiose, but in an age where anxiety and depression are devouring people left and right, a kind gesture can go a long way.
“You can change the trajectory of someone’s day,” Carly said.
“And to add to that, you can change the trajectory of the world,” Josh added.
The foundation is putting on a concert as its first annual fundraiser because Ellie was a musician at heart. She was a huge fan of the band Phish, and an online movement picked up to get the band to dedicate a song to her while on tour.
“Trey dedicated the ‘Mango Song’ to Ellie on stage,” Josh said. “They’ve hardly done any dedications in their career. It was really beautiful. For Ellie to be written in Phish history, or Phishtory if you will, that wouldn’t matter to most kids, but Ellie would have loved it. All she wanted was Trey’s autograph.”
You can learn more about the benefit concert here, which will include silent auction items like an armored vehicle ride from the Boulder Police Department, a signed Caitlin Clark jersey, climbing lessons at Movement Gym, and a family membership with Gravity Haus.