one by one®: Dustin’s Place
Viki Brown was 34 years old with three children—ages 6, 5 and 11 months—when her husband died in a car crash. While she was able to access grief support for herself, she found little help for her children in dealing with the loss of their father. “The wait list was over 10 months to get my daughter into therapy,” Brown remembered. “There were places I could go to group, and they could come with me, but there was no one trained in children’s grief and how to support a child. Through that lack of resources for my own children came Dustin’s Place.”
With Brown as its co-founder and executive director, Dustin’s Place is a nonprofit that offers peer support groups for children and adults who have experienced the death of a person in their life. The Plymouth, Indiana-based organization runs bi-weekly grief support groups, in-school grief support groups and community crisis teams—all at no cost.
The power of community support
Allowing Dustin’s Place to carry out its mission of no child grieving alone is a team of 23 volunteers. These individuals come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, but together are the facilitators for the organization’s peer support groups. Among them are counselors, therapists and retired teachers.
The support groups for children are broken down into age groups, ranging from 4-6 up to teens ages 14-18. Adult support groups are organized by circumstances, with meetings for spousal bereavement, families, child loss, young adults, suicide and substance abuse bereavement.
Dustin’s Place typically serves seven counties in northern Indiana, but one family recently traveled from Michigan. “Pretty much anyone can drive to us. Some travel three minutes, some travel an hour and 45 minutes,” said Brown. “We are one of five children’s grief centers in the state, so there’s not a lot out there for kids.”
Creative use of promotional lunch boxes
This year Dustin’s Place hosted its first summer grief camp. The one-day event at a fitness center in Plymouth, Indiana, welcomed nearly 60 children and more than 40 volunteers for swimming, rock climbing and other grief-specific activities.
A one by one grant provided promotional lunch boxes used in an activity where children built toolboxes for their grief. They filled the boxes with items like stress balls and candles. The children then took their grief toolboxes home. Some families held on to them as keepsakes while some use them as lunch boxes.
One of the tools in the toolbox was a letter to their lost loved ones on dissolvable paper, which was rolled up and mixed into a bubble-blowing liquid. Each child then blew bubbles to release their letter into the world. “So many times we are left without the opportunity to say goodbye,” Brown said. “So we let them write to their loved ones to say that goodbye. They can say the things they wish they could have said.”
A note from Cheryl
We were moved to learn about Dustin’s Place and its work to help children and adults grieve the loss of their loved ones. It was humbling to provide promotional lunch boxes that were used in such a thoughtful way. If you’re interested in a one by one grant, visit onebyone.4imprint.com.