Whilst in Portland, I had the opportunity to visit Alysha Lacey (Director of Program Services) at the Dougy Center.
The Dougy Center provides grief support to children, teenagers, young adults and their family members. It aims to provide a safe space to allow for the sharing of experiences before and after a death. This safe space takes the form of a facilitated peer support group in line with the Dougy Center peer grief support model.
The Dougy Center offers 70 peer support groups which are divided by age ( ranging from 3 to 40 years old), manner of death (natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined death) and relationship to the deceased (parent or primary caregiver, sibling, close friend, partner). For participants under the age of 18 a concurrent group is offered to adult caregivers.
The Center also has a ‘Pathways program’ to support families who have a family member living with an advanced serious illness.
An additional group, very much relevant to the focus of my Fellowship, was the L.Y.G.H.T peer support program for young people in foster care. L.Y.G.H.T. stands for ‘Listening and Led by Youth in Foster Care: Grief, Hope and Transitions’. The group is open to individuals aged 12 or older living in out of home or foster care, with self-reported feelings of sadness or anger due to the loss of at least one person or thing.
L.Y.G.H.T was developed to provide a grief-informed and trauma-informed program to support young people in foster care who are grieving. This was in response to research evidencing that young people in foster care report their experiences of death and non-death losses to be underacknowledged in the state welfare system (Mitchell 2010, 2017). .
All of the Dougy Center's groups are free of charge and meet bi-weekly. Groups are open-ended and not time-limited. The reasoning behind this, is to honour the uniqueness of each individual’s experience of grief and to avoid implications that progress should have been made by a certain point in time or that people should have 'moved on'.
Groups are facilitated by staff group co-ordinators and trained volunteers. They take the form of a pre-meeting (allowing time for group facilitators to gather, connect and prepare for the group). The pre-meeting is then followed by the peer support group itself (consisting of an opening circle, loss and grief conversation, activity or play and closing circle). Lastly, facilitators come together for a post-meeting (to process the group and to self-care).
Rituals such as candle lighting are also acknowledged by the Center as an important part of the grief group process in terms of regaining a sense of control and personal empowerment.
Alysha very kindly gave me a tour of the building and its wonderful 'expression rooms', each with a different focus and theme...
In addition to peer support groups, the Dougy Center provides training and support to individuals and organisations helping children experiencing grief. This might take the form of more formal education and training to professionals; individual consultations to people supporting grieving families; or community response and support (e.g. after large scale tragedies).
Alysha discussed that she had been drawn to the Dougy Center due to its focus on the 'play as the work' and the Center's recognition of the importance of having different means to express grief. Alysha also appreciated the Center's acknowledgement of grief as unique to the individual rather than prescriptive.
(With heartfelt thanks to Alysha for her time and to the Dougy Center)
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