Loved and Lost is a statewide collaboration with two goals: First, to name as many New Jersey COVID-19 victims as we are able to verify and add them to our wall of names at LovedAndLostNJ.com; and second, to have journalists and storytellers do as many stories about the people who died as we possibly can.

Loved and Lost was originally a project of NorthJersey.com and is now being coordinated as a statewide collaborative by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, thanks to support from The Nicholson Foundation. You can see The Record’s re-launch of the project in print on these pages from Sunday, June 21: page 1, page 2, page 3 and page 4.

We’re recruiting media and storytelling partners across the state to help in this mammoth effort; large and small, independent, hyperlocal, nonprofit and public media are all welcome, as are student journalists, independent journalists, local media-makers and storytellers. We are asking all partners to help promote the name submission form noted above, to send us links to stories they have already done about individuals who died from COVID-19, and to continue to produce stories about others.

We are grateful to Dan and his team at NorthJersey.com, especially editor Jim O’Neill, for their leadership in getting this project launched and organized.

We are thankful for the support of The Nicholson Foundation. This is very personal to their team; Colette Lamothe-Galette, a senior program officer at The Nicholson Foundation, passed away on April 4 at the age of 45, a victim of COVID-19. This is also personal to us at the Center, as one of our staffers, Nicole Wigfall, lost her father Thomas A. Wigfall, Jr. to COVID-19 on April 1.

For more information about the project, contact the Center at [email protected] or project coordinator [email protected].