Whilst in Portland, I had the opportunity to meet with Alysha Lacey (Director of Program Services) at the Dougy Center.
The Dougy Center provides grief support to children, teenagers, young adults and their families. It aims to provide a safe space where individuals can share their experiences before and after a death. This safe space takes shape through facilitated peer support groups, following the Dougy Center's unique peer grief support model.
With over 70 peer support groups, the Center ensures that every individual’s experience of loss is met with understanding and compassion. Groups are thoughtfully divided by age (ranging from 3 to 40 years), manner of death (natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined), and relationship to the deceased (parent or caregiver, sibling, close friend, or partner). For participants under 18, concurrent support groups are available for their adult caregivers, recognizing the importance of a holistic family approach.
In addition to grief after death, the Center offers the Pathways Program, which supports individuals dealing with a family member’s advanced serious illness. This program provides a vital lifeline to those grappling with anticipatory grief and the complexities of care-giving.
Particularly relevant to my Fellowship focus was the 'Listening and Led by Youth in Foster Care: Grief, Hope, and Transitions' (L.Y.G.H.T) peer support program. L.Y.G.H.T serves young people (aged 12 and over) who live 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 under-acknowledged in the state welfare system (Mitchell 2010, 2017). .
The Dougy Center’s peer support groups are free of charge, meet bi-weekly, and are open-ended. This flexible structure honours the uniqueness of each individual’s grief journey, avoiding any suggestion that healing must follow a prescribed timeline, or that one should eventually ‘move on.’
Groups are facilitated by staff coordinators and trained volunteers. The group structure includes:
Pre-meeting: Facilitators gather to connect, prepare and align their approach for the group session.
Peer Support Group: This begins with an opening circle, followed by conversations about loss and grief, activities or play, and a closing circle.
Post-meeting: Facilitators reconvene to process the session and engage in 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 kindly gave me a tour of the Dougy Center's beautifully designed 'expression rooms'. Each room is dedicated to a different theme, providing diverse avenues for people to express their grief through art, play, movement or quiet reflection. These spaces embody the Center’s ethos that grief is not 'one-size-fits-all' and that every individual needs different tools to navigate their healing journey.
Below are some pictures of the Center's expression rooms:
In addition to peer support groups, the Dougy Center provides training and consultation for professionals and organisation supporting grieving children. This includes formal training, individual consultations and community responses following large-scale tragedies.
Alysha shared that one of the Dougy Center's key strengths is its acknowledgement of grief as unique to the individual rather than prescriptive. There is no 'right' way or timeline to process loss and the Center's flexible, supportive environment reflects this understanding. Alysha also discussed that she had personally been drawn to the Center due to its focus on the 'play as the work'. The Center recognizes that play is an essential part of processing grief and provides a medium through which emotions can be safely explored.
(With heartfelt thanks to Alysha for her time and to the Dougy Center)