Growing Through Grief is a school-based grief support and crisis management program supported by the Park Nicollet Foundation that provides children with peer support groups, individual counseling and death-related crisis response after they’ve experienced the loss of a loved one.
Nicole Barnes, Growing Through Grief program manager, and Judy Brown, Minneapolis Public Schools mental health manager, outline the prevalence of childhood bereavement and share the C.A.R.E.S. (community, awareness, resiliency, empathy and strength) support group model. The episode highlights how the partnership between health care and education systems brings additional resources to schools that share education and renewal practices with students that bring hope and healing. Listen to the episode or read the transcript.
Finding their way to Growing Through Grief
Neither Judy Brown nor Nicole Barnes set out to develop a program that would help children grieve. Barnes was a 15-year veteran camp counselor before she became involved in social work. She progressed in her career, working in the medical field and eventually connecting with the Park Nicollet Foundation and its resources. Barnes saw how using major systems, like medicine and public schools, could create change and improve well-being in the lives of the community.
“It became a great challenge and a great career adventure for me to partner with community members that want to make a difference for our kids,” she says.
Brown, on the other hand, began her social work career on staff at a corrections facility. Even as a corrections officer, they all called her “the social worker” because of her willingness to connect with inmates. It was an impulse to teach and help that Brown couldn’t ignore.
“My family is educators, and I would create opportunities for the youth in the correctional institution,” she says. “I would create opportunities for them to experience things they’d never experienced before. Like apply for college, fill out job applications … I would do everything – teach them how to cook and barbeque – because as the officer, we could create these opportunities to get different activities for them.”
Opening up to grief
Eventually, Brown took a position in the school system as a social worker and mental health support manager for Minneapolis Public Schools. There, she saw the need for grief and loss support.
It would take a while, Brown noticed, for kids to reveal that they’d lost someone and were grieving. She transitioned in her role, became the manager of mental health and took a look at the grief curriculum that already existed. But it no longer served the needs of her current students.
“It was focused on students that experienced loss through the death of their parent due to a medical issue,” says Brown. Some of her students had experienced this, she says, but a much larger group were experiencing grief from a different cause. In developing a new program that would fit the needs of grieving students, Brown met Barnes and Growing Through Grief began.
Childhood bereavement is on the rise
Barnes says, “We listened to the schools tell us that grief is something that happens in our schools, not every day but often enough.” She says they needed ways to respond to students’ needs in a way that was professional, specialized and sensitive to what the students were experiencing.
In part to factors like COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent community violence, childhood bereavement is on the rise. It’s risen about 50% says Barnes.
“People don’t always think about the kids when they think about community violence and the tragedy that can happen in our world,” says Barnes. The fact remains that medical deaths, things like cancer or cardiac events, are no longer the leading cause of parental death. Deaths from COVID-19, suicide, homicide by gun violence and overdose are the four leading causes of childhood bereavement from a parent’s death.
“Kids have to answer questions and figure this out at a young age,” says Barnes. “We don’t want them to have to figure it out so young, but it is their reality.”
Grief isn’t just one thing
When grief support programs help students through loss, that might not necessarily mean a death of someone – it could be the loss of someone from their environment or community. A person doesn’t need to be dead to be grieved by a child.
Now Barnes and Brown are focusing on giving students the space and language to feel and express their feelings.
“It takes a long time to get them to calm down and verbalize what happened,” says Brown of students in crisis. “They’re usually tearing up stuff, they’re beating on walls because they don’t have the words. They just don’t have the words, and they’re overwhelmed with grief and loss, and they need to know it’s okay to feel sad and miss a family member and not want to talk and be by themselves for a while.”
Barnes says they’re creating a community and a safe place for kids, because that’s something they don’t always have. “When the neighbor gets shot or they’re locking themselves in the house because there are sirens all around…it’s hard to talk about that,” she says.
Building trust, building relationships
Programming starts with building up students’ trust and confidence in the program’s confidentiality. It creates safety, which allows for language, which supports an environment for healing.
Barnes says building trust tells students, “You’re in the right place, you can make the decisions that make sense for you. You can make the decisions that give you the power and help you make the difference you want to make in this world. If you have the right place, you can do that.”
Another aspect of trust-building is getting the adults on board with the program. Fifty percent of the students who come to group sessions are there on the guidance of a trusted adult.
Barnes says that building trust in systems is also essential for programs like theirs to work. “We go into our professions to help individuals,” she says. “And then we realize we can’t really do that unless we understand how to support families and communities and systems. That’s what Judy and I and our teams have done: we’ve brought two systems together – two main, stable systems in our community, the medical and educational system – to explore how to treat the grief and trauma in our schools.”
She adds, “Grief and loss is a topic we’re not supposed to talk about, but we’re changing the world here.”
