About one year into the Covid-19 pandemic, an organization with a mission to help people die peacefully, the Hospice Giving Foundation of Monterey, invited mental health professionals on the front lines to share what they thought their clients needed most. The dominant theme, President and CEO Siobhan Greene says, was that people needed a way to grieve. Not just the loss of life, but a way of life lost under the shadow of the pandemic. And not just for themselves, but as witnesses to the suffering of the world.
Greene and her team decided the foundation was in a position to make a difference. With a commitment of $500,000 toward a $1.5 million fundraising goal, they created a two-year initiative designed to offer a multi-faceted program in English and Spanish. They raised a total of $1.18 million and in December they chose Coastal Kids Home Care of Salinas to be the nonprofit delivering the services. “They had the grit and the fire in the belly to make it work,” Greene says.
Coastal Kids was launched in 2005 by a pediatric nurse as the only pediatric home health agency in California to provide medical care to children suffering from serious illnesses, along with end-of-life care and support to parents and families. Early in 2021, the nonprofit agreed to take on existing bereavement support groups from the Papillon Center For Loss and Transformation, when that nonprofit folded.
“We found ourselves as the organization that had the most capacity for bereavement care,” says Kelli Brown, Coastal Kids’ development director.
Heal Together has three main objectives, Brown says. First is to improve the capacity of local mental health care providers by providing grief and bereavement training. In April they are offering training to licensed professionals, as well as to non-licensed providers like school counselors, pastors and peer counselors.
Second is to spread awareness in the community about grief. They’re working with the Center for Community Advocacy to reach farmworkers, as well as Harmony at Home which works with schoolchildren, and the Alliance on Aging to reach seniors.
The third objective is to connect people to grief and bereavement services at whatever level they need. From their office in Salinas that they’re calling the Heal Together Hub, an intake coordinator matches people to one-on-one counseling, support groups or activity classes.
Currently all of the services under Heal Together are free. Since December, they’ve received over 100 phone calls and placed approximately 60 people in services. “The fact that we get multiple calls every week shows us it’s a resource the community needed,” Brown says. “We hope it becomes a model for other communities.”
Caring Kids has also been called upon to provide grief rapid response in crisis situations, including for 911 dispatchers who handled calls during the shooting death of Salinas Police Officer JD Alvarado on Feb. 25.