Hope 2021

For HopeWest Kids. Acrylic & collage. 2021

A piece I wrote last year in my position as Director of Youth Programs at HopeWest.

Let's keep hoping...

Hope shows us how to act.

Hope keeps us going.

Hope is a healer.

When we have hope, we are more likely to see the opportunities that come our way and to believe in and choose a path that leads to a peaceful and meaningful life. 

Hope: “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true”. Webster

 

Dear Friends,

Last year, in 2020, the National Alliance for Grieving Children’s campaign was: “Believe there is hope in the world”.  Within that phrase is: ‘Be the Hope in the World’  The focus of that awareness campaign has me thinking about ways in which we hold and instill hope for the children and teens of our community,  who come to us heartbroken and confused in the midst of an illness or after death of a of loved one.

In 2020, our pandemic year, we adapted services in so many ways: reaching out using virtual platforms in way we would have never imagined, companioning children and teens through their losses using new and modified on-line resources, creating activity kits enabling to work independently with their support of their families, adding summer programming in the form of small/ distanced groups and even supporting other clinicians and teachers with a newly developed consulting role for bereavement support in our schools.  

In Grand Junction we provided support to nearly 420 children and teens: 131 in individual counseling sessions, compared to 149 in 2019.   We served 231 in school groups, 24 in our family group and 18 in summer groups and open studio sessions.

We made every effort to make support available in a year of isolation and unprecedented uncertainty, providing:

…the creative space for the teen who lost his sister to suicide at home this year; the listening ear for the little girl whose mother died of cancer; the guidance for the teens whose mother died of chronic alcohol use, the support for the one whose grandparent who lived far away and died in a time we couldn’t make visits.  To sit with them through pain and to listen to every story they had to tell, that is to companion, and thus transform their grief experience.

Who would believe, in such a year, that we could continue to provide support, counseling conversations and walks with kids who were reeling from losses of friends and loved ones?  Who would have believed that were able to continue to meet kids where they are in their grief experience and to provide and continue to develop a level of expertise that allows for safe specialized care that enables change- even transformation.

You believed!... and we are seated in such gratitude for your encouragement and support.  For what else is there if we do not show up and stay present; if we do not hold the hand of our children and guide our teens through the experience of grief and loss that they may understand and heal.

Hope is the heart of this work.

As long as we can instill hope in the hearts of the children and teens in our community, they can grow through their loss and heal…we can heal.

As long as we have your support, we can do just that.

 

Hope is the last thing ever lost. (Italian proverb)