Happy 6th Day of Christmas!

The Dougy Center provides a space where children, young people, and their families who are grieving a death can share and process their experiences. They provide direct support to people, in the form of facilitating peer support groups, and also provide materials and training for people around the world who need to be able to handle similar needs.

Just reading their description of their work on their mission and history page, it sounds… just tremendously heavy. They serve about 850 people a month, which, given that we’re talking about kids facing death and loss, and their familes, feels like a lot. They’ve worked with about 40,000 people since their founding in 1982, which, again, just feels overwhelming. I have a hard time thinking about the impact of such a loss on a single kid, and these folks help this work happen on a much larger scale.

As hard as it is to think about kids going through this, I’m glad that so many haven’t had to go through it alone.