From Tragedy to Mission: Meet CHRN Team Member Katrina Blanc

When tragedy struck the Blanc family, it changed the trajectory of their lives forever. Church HR Network team member Katrina Blanc faced her family’s tragedy with resolve, aiming to turn the odds against the leading killer of infants and children under four years of age.

Drowning is a deadly and quiet threat that is often overlooked, but it exists anywhere water and children mix. Katrina’s family lost their 2-year-old daughter Kendall to drowning in their backyard pool on June 22, 2019. “I felt so alone after losing her, and the realization that this happens so often to so many others made me dig deep…” Katrina says. “It is absolutely the toughest thing I have ever gone through in my life.”

After their devastating loss, a close friend of Katrina’s noticed her love for researching solutions and prevention and challenged Katrina to put it to effective use, saying, “Who better to make a change than you?” Encouraged by this, Katrina developed a motto: “Know better, do better,” which she now carries into all areas of her life. She spent the last several years regrouping and learning how to help other unsuspecting parents become aware of the preventative measures available to keep this tragedy from striking their families. Katrina says, “What is so shocking to me is that people do not know they have the number one potential death trap for children right in their own homes.”

In honor of her daughter, Katrina founded The Kendall Bug Mission, a non-profit foundation whose mission is to prevent childhood drowning through water safety education and access to preventative resources. Survival swim lessons include hands-on, in-water activities for parents to help positively reinforce their child’s learning and safety. Though fees for these lessons can be prohibitive for some, the Kendal Bug Mission strives to offer scholarships to as many families as possible. Katrina says her goal for 2024-2025 is to have twenty families covered by a 100% scholarship through the foundation and to expand to an indoor facility to teach year-round. Church HR Network is proud to support them in their efforts!

Katrina admits she was not a big swimmer nor much of a water lover, but she and her family had a pool at home and her children enjoyed it almost daily. “Another shocking discovery,” she says, “was the amount of accessibility to pools and other water sources we have here in Southern California, yet the lack of water safety education available in the area. I want to provide families with a resource to learn to be water-safe with their children so they won’t be caught unaware in devastation that could have been prevented.”

Katrina and The Kendall Bug Mission are connected with Infant Swimming Resource (ISR), an organization that teaches children a technique in which they swim a short distance, rotate to their backs to float, and repeat the process until they reach a safe place or until help arrives. One of ISR’s core convictions is “that the child is the most important part of a drowning prevention strategy, and our over 450,000 ISR graduates and hundreds of documented survival stories are proof that children can, and do, save themselves.” Katrina has since become a licensed ISR instructor and hopes to train others to provide survival swim lessons. “We want more children and their families to be water-safe. I wish someone had shared this resource with me so that I could have been prepared.”

We at CHRN are so proud of Katrina and her tireless efforts to honor Kendall and educate as many families as she can. For more of her story, visit www.thekendallbugmission.org.