When Jennie Johnley left her job at Missouri Auto Auction in 2018 and decided to be a stay-at-home mom, she thought her ties to the auto auction industry had ended.

“I really thought I was leaving it behind,” Johnley said of her seven-year tenure at the auction.

But facing the darkest days of her life a year later, Johnley found that she was very much still part of the auction family.

And their support over the last five years has helped Johnley create a legacy of hope from the embers of sorrow, spreading joy like morning light over a sunflower field.

Hope rises from despair

In 2019, the Johnleys’ daughter Bree passed away at age 4. In the ensuing weeks, the Johnleys began volunteering more than they ever had before, with the mindset of “how can we help others? How can we restore others?”

The answer was Bree’s Gift, a nonprofit organization Johnley started in memory and honor of her late daughter that provides families with up to 100% of the funding needed to adopt a child.

The organization has given more than $1 million to families looking to adopt, helping to fund 47 adoptions in 16 states.

And the auction industry, particularly Missouri Auto Auction, has played a huge role.

MAA holds an annual fundraiser for Bree’s Gift, where they raise between $60,000-70,000 each year, Johnley said. The auction gathers 300-500 people from across Missouri to the event and sale, including national consignor accounts, as well as many others online.

The auction is part of ServNet, which is making Bree’s Gift the focal point of its ServNet Serves campaign leading into the National Auto Auction Association’s World Remarketing Convention this year.

The auction group started the campaign at Used Car Week last year in Scottsdale, Ariz., as a way for its members to bring national attention to local charities and causes.

The convention is happening in Kansas City, Mo., roughly a two-hour drive from MAA. To have such support from the auction industry, first locally and now nationally, is a full-circle moment from Johnley.

“I don’t know why, but my auction family was someone that I thought of almost immediately after losing her. And my assumption was, I’m no longer a part of it. I won’t have their support,” Johnley said.

“They won’t reach out to me.  That chapter is over and I’m kind of in this new season of sorrow and anguish and grief on my own because I’ve left that.  So, to feel this full circle moment of being back in the community,  it’s hard for me to even articulate because it’s beyond an honor and a privilege to still feel that love,” she said.

“Especially when you’ve been through the depths of hell and anguish that I’ve been through,  it’s almost like you have to experience it to even feel the gratitude that I feel towards all of the guys and to be welcomed back in,  open arms and the messages that I’ve received just over the past five years and after Bree’s death,  it’s a sense of gratitude that I think you could only experience it if you lived through the hell.  It’s an overwhelming feeling …  I feel so lucky.”

ServNet steps up

ServNet Serves aims to highlight the nonprofits its member auctions are helping locally and amplify those efforts nationally. The auction connected with Johnley and Bree’s Gift through MAA, where Johnley’s brother Justin Brown is general manager. MAA vice president Cody Boswell is part of the leadership at ServNet.

Leading up to the NAAA Convention, ServNet will be highlighting Bree’s Gift each week on LinkedIn to help raise awareness and share the story of the organization. And then ServNet will conduct a matching fundraising program at the convention.

The auction group will be sharing “weekly checkpoints” so that ServNet clients and the overall remarketing community to spread the word on what Bree’s Gift is and the story behind it.

“The whole goal is to be a really just a liaison between what the great partnership is already taking place and being that liaison to the rest of the community to say, ‘hey, this is the awesome story of what this nonprofit is doing and help us be a part of it and help us become that national family’” to amplify the efforts of the nonprofit across the country, said Ana Williams, who is director of meetings and event coordinator at ServNet.

She later added, “ServNet Serves started from the mindset of when we’re coming to these cities for these conferences, ‘how can we make this about other people?  How can we spread the generosity and the love … how can we give that to others instead of making it only about what our accomplishments are and what the auctions have done?’”

ServNet Serves has worked with a few other nonprofits through the relationships its member auctions have on a local/state level.

“It’s just (looking at) how can we as an independent community through ServNet join forces with already the amazing work that those local auctions are doing,” Williams said.

A human connection

That amazing work begins in places like Columbia, Mo.

When Johnley speaks to the crowd before the annual Bree’s Gift event at Missouri Auto Auction, there’s a lot of parents in the crowd. Grandparents, too.

And she can feel empathy, their compassion.

“When they see me standing up there pouring out my heart to them, there’s a connection there that they feel … It’s this human connection of, ‘I see you hurting and I’ll do anything to wrap my arms around that to make you feel one step closer to being whole again. And if that’s by me donating and participating in this sale, that is the least I can do,’” Johnley said.

Those supporters don’t want a pat on the back, she said. Or even to be thanked.

That’s not why they do it, Johnley said.

“I wish more people could experience it,” Johnley said of the support she gets from the auction industry, “because it’s unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of, ever.”

And she pays it forward, quite literally.

‘We want to be that relief’

Rather than providing a grant here and a grant there for multiple families, Bree’s Gift has taken the approach of funding the entire process for a specific family.

(The adoption agencies themselves conduct the vetting process of the families as well as background checks Johnley said. Once they reach Bree’s Gift, they’ve already onboarded with an agency)

“What we found is that people are scraping (together) pennies. The process is just so grueling and the paperwork is so grueling and the waiting is so incredibly hard, especially when you say you have a family who’s never had kids,” she said.

“They’ve already been dealing with infertility and (challenges) like that,” Johnley said. “So this journey of becoming parents may have started five years ago and they’re at step one again.

“When they reach out to us after they’ve been through the approval process with their agency, and now they just need funding, we want to be that relief,” she said.

A reprieve of the soul in knowing they don’t have to go anywhere else.

“You don’t have to fill out any more paperwork.  You don’t have to suffer any longer.  You don’t have to worry. We’ve got it,” she said.

“Send us the bill … whether that’s 20 grand, 50 grand, $3,000, we are covering it because we want you to rest in the (comfort of) ‘I know I’m going to get my child and I’m going to prepare my heart for that and my home for that. And these finances and this worry and this burden and this weight that has just been carrying me down, it’s lifted,’” Johnley said.

And so, too, are the spirits of the children Bree’s Gift is helping find a home. That’s what comes to mind when asked about the organization’s success stories, Johnley said.

“Just seeing photos of the children who get adopted and then seeing the change that takes place even over 30 days and even over two months, I mean, it is a night-and-day difference of the light in their eyes and the love that they feel and just like the health that that family has poured into them,” Johnley said.

She sees that same change, “in the hearts of the families who could not have children, kind of a change in your perspective on life and restoring hope and restoring that resilience that was kind of stuffed deep down,” she said.

“Honestly, for what started as a small organization, I think the biggest thing is just the power that has come behind Bree’s Gift.  It’s just a force,” Johnley said, later adding: “There’s something very unnatural about (the power of) Bree’s Gift. I mean,  I don’t live in a major city like St. Louis or Kansas City, and yes, I’m connected to the auction in Columbia … but the odds would have been against me, I think.

“And there’s something much larger that has happened and on a national scale,” Johnley said. “We’re helping kids all over the world.  We’re helping families all across the United States. It’s powerful.”

To learn how you can support Bree’s Gift, visit https://www.breesgift.com.