The Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) is hosting a webinar this Wednesday, May 16th on how children and teens experience grief. TCR founder Phyllis Silverman, Phd, MSW, ScM, will share knowledge she’s gained from her decades of research and work with grieving children and families. Visit ADEC’s website to learn more and register for this webinar. If you’re not able to watch it live, you can also purchase a recording of the presentation.

An amazing turn-out for our Circle of Hope Breakfast on May 3rd!

We are so glad if you were able to join us at our annual breakfast. It was wonderful to share this year’s inspiring program with so many

"See the Sun" performed by Alex and Nick

Courtney's inspiring testimony

caring friends of The Children’s Room! The enormous outpouring of support will clearly make a difference in the lives of grieving children and families this year. As we grow, we envision adding family support groups, starting more school-based groups, and expanding our educational outreach. If you were not able to attend the breakfast this year, but would like contribute, you can make a secure, online donation here. We hope you’ll join us next year!

We are deeply appreciative of the support of our community, enabling The Children’s Room to continue to offer vital and life-changing services to grieving families.

Despite record-high temperatures, all five of TCR’s Miles + Memories runners crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon!

TCR staff members Kim & Donna cheer on Anne at mile 18

Members of the TCR community gathered and cheered on Chris, Deana, Jill, Anne, and Courtney from the sidelines at mile 18 on race day. We are so proud to be part of their inspiring accomplishment! Their tireless commitment raised crucial funds for programs serving grieving children, teens, and families.

The Miles + Memories Team sprinted past their fundraising goal and raised over $50,000 in support for The Children’s Room!

You can read more in this MassNonprofit news feature on TCR’s marathon success.

Thank you to everyone who supported our Miles + Memories Marathon Team!

2012 Miles + Memories Team: Deana Hickey, Anne Scharpf, Courtney Silva, and Chris Ellsasser (not pictured: Jill Hurley)

After months of intense training, our Miles + Memories Team is less than a week away from running the Boston Marathon! Learn more about our runners and what inspires them to take on this life-altering challenge for The Children’s Room.

The Children’s Room recently hosted an auction evening to benefit our marathon runners. Our cozy house was filled with energy and camaraderie as we all celebrated our five runners and reflected on the importance of The Children’s Room’s mission to serve grieving children, teens, and families. Thanks to some amazing volunteers, donations from local businesses, and the involvement of our generous TCR community, the event was a great success!

Left to right: Michael Gilligan, Board co-chair; Neil Fisher, Board member; Phyllis Silverman, founding Board member; Donna Smith Sharff, executive director; Mary Ellen Margosian, Board member

• Visit our runners’ fundraising pages and consider supporting their run by making a donation in memory or honor of a loved one.
• Share our runners’ stories with your friends and family to increase awareness about The Children’s Room and to support our team!
• Join our cheering section on race day!

Be a part of the TCR cheering section at Mile 18!

Join the fun on Marathon Monday! We’ll be located at Mile 18 at the intersection of Commonwealth Ave. and Chestnut St. in Newton, within walking distance from the Waban T stop on the Riverside (D) green line. Wear royal blue and help us cheer for our runners on this exciting day! If you have any questions or want to let us know that you’re coming, email sarah@childrensroom.org. We hope to see you there!

Join us for a volunteer day in The Children’s Room garden!

Monday, April 9th
2 – 6pm

A garden expert from COG Design will be here to help get our garden ready for the spring and summer seasons! Please come join us if you’d like to be involved with making “Hope Grow Here!”

For those not able to join us on this day, stay tuned for more opportunities to be involved in our ongoing garden project! If you have questions or want to let us know that you’re coming, email sarah@childrensroom.org.

Watch this incredible video of how our garden was created!

With help from our community, The Children’s Room was able to create a peaceful and welcoming garden space for the children, teens, and families that we serve. In addition to COGdesign’s gifts of talent and resources, many TCR volunteers helped make everything possible — including one of our volunteer facilitators, Kerry Lewis, who is also a professional landscape architect! We’re so grateful for everyone’s help and to Kathy Tarantola for documenting our progress and creating this amazing video for us to share with you!

As the days start to warm up, it’s time to start thinking about summer camps!

To help you find a camp that’s right for your family, The Children’s Room has put together a list of 2012 summer camps for grieving children and teens. Check out camp descriptions and dates on the 2012 Summer Camps page in our Resources section.

Attend an Open House to learn more!

There will be an Open House for two of these summer camps, Manitou Experience and Circle of Tapawingo, at The Children’s Room on Sunday, April 29th at 6pm. Pizza will be served. Please RSVP to the representative of the camp in which you are interested.

Manitou Experience provides boys, entering grades 5-10, who have experienced a significant death-loss with a one-week summer camp program that helps build confidence, encourage laughter, and navigate their grief through friendship, teamwork, athletics, and the common bond of loss.

- RSVP to ryan@manitouexperience.org

Circle of Tapawingo is a week-long overnight camp program for girls between the ages of eight and sixteen who have experienced the death of a parent. Our mission is twofold: to offer our campers the adventures and fun of living and playing together at a beautiful, traditional overnight camp in Maine while offering them a supportive place in which to share their grief.

- RSVP to Cathy at cspear@circleoftapawingo.org

We set the dates for our next Workshop Series!

The Children’s Room is happy to present an educational opportunity for teachers, counselors, social workers, and other professionals who work with children and families. Deborah Rivlin, Director of Education & Training at TCR, will be leading four workshops this August on issues affecting grieving children of all ages and their communities. Continuing Education credits are available.

Topics include:

• Fostering Resiliency in Children Coping with Death, Illness, and Other Losses
• Helping Your Community Respond to Loss: Creating a Crisis Team and Plan of Action
• “If we lost Uncle David, why don’t we go find him?” Strategies for Talking with Young Children about Death, Dying, and Loss
• Understanding the Challenges of Loss in Adolescence

Learn more by visiting our Workshops page or downloading our 2012 Summer Workshop Series flyer.

Festive food and drinks added to the night's success

Richard and Lisa Greene hosted a very special cocktail reception at their home, to appreciate members of our Circle of Hope Giving Community. Many TCR supporters gathered together at this memorable event, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Centerpoint Advisors, The Betsy Hotel, and the Plutzik Goldwasser Family Foundation.

TCR and Centerpoint leaders: Richard Greene, Donna Smith Sharff, Michael Gilligan, Jennifer Wolfsberg, and John Wolfsberg

Everyone listened to a beautiful talk by Courtney Silva, whose father died when she was age six. Courtney is now 25 and she spoke of being honored and excited to work in our Sunday group at TCR, supporting six- and seven-year-old children who have experienced the death of a parent or sibling. Having once been supported by The Children’s Room, she now gives back to families at TCR as a program volunteer.

Richard & Lisa Greene announce the raffle winner

An exciting moment of the evening came when names were drawn for the raffle – two lucky guests won a gift certificate for a wonderful trip to The Betsy Hotel in Florida! Philanthropy programs at the Betsy in Southbeach make this beachfront hotel a model of community partnership.  We appreciate The Betsy’s commitment to good works and the generous trip they donated to The Children’s Room.

The event marked the gathering of our many generous Circle of Hope donors. Great food and camaraderie made it a night to remember.

Experienced fundraiser Nancy Simpson-Banker has extensive background in capital campaigns for human service organizations

ARLINGTON, February 22, 2012—The Children’s Room of Arlington announces today that Nancy Simpson-Banker has joined the nonprofit as its Director of Development. Simpson-Banker has extensive experience stewarding major gift donors, and in running capital campaigns for human service organizations. Simpson-Banker was, most recently, the Director of Recruitment and Training for University Advancement for Boston College.

Simpson-Banker is the first full-time director of development at The Children’s Room, which was founded in 1999. Previously, The Children’s Room’s current Director of Communications, Anne Favaloro, also had the title Director of Development and split her time between development and communications responsibilities. Favaloro will expand her communications role at The Children’s Room and assist as Simpson-Banker assumes full responsibility for development initiatives.

“Nancy is a talented professional with an extensive background in capital campaigns and major gifts. She is passionate about our mission, which is to help grieving children, teens, and families to go on living fully. Bereaved families come to us in emotional, spiritual, and financial crisis. They have critical needs, and Nancy knows that we can’t do our work without a strong base of financial support,” said Donna Sharff, executive director of The Children’s Room. “We are also very excited that Anne will be devoting all of her energies to marketing and communications. We’re looking forward to expanding our profile within the communities we serve.”

Simpson-Banker has participated in numerous development campaigns over the last 25 years, including an $11 million capital campaign for Mt. Auburn Hospital. She cultivated Faulkner Hospital’s first-ever $1 million gift, and doubled annual fundraising revenues during her seven-year tenure. She has presented on development, special-event fundraising, and major gifts for professional associations and conferences. She lives in Needham where she is an active member of the First Parish of Needham.

“This is an amazing opportunity to raise funds for services and programs that change people’s lives,” said Simpson-Banker. “The Children’s Room nurtures families and individuals who are in deep emotional crises as a result of premature death. This is an issue that affected me deeply when I was a teen, and I feel privileged to be in a position where I can now help others in the same position.”

Favaloro, a former producer for WGBH and book editor, will be expanding her role creating multimedia, video, and print projects for The Children’s Room. “This is a very exciting opportunity,” said Favaloro. “There are a lot of stories to tell about the life-changing work that happens at The Children’s Room, and I look forward to sharing those stories.”

Memories That Move Us – Our annual Memories Walk was a wonderful day for our community, and we thank our many supporters for being part of our biggest walk ever!  Please check back soon to see more photographs from the day, featuring walkers in bright green shirts. We will also be posting more news about how this event helped with our fall fundraising efforts to support The Children’s Room.

Still want to donate to this year’s walk? It’s not too late to make an online contribution at  Firstgiving.

Again, we thank our generous walk sponsors, all the friends and volunteers and donors who made our Memories Walk a success again this year, and we especially thank the Arlington Hockey Club for another amazing year of support!

Tours of The Children’s Room are open to those in our communities who would like to learn more about how peer support groups help grieving children, teens, and families.

Guests hear a heartfelt welcome from a board or staff member, then take a 45 minute walk through the house.

People tell us after the tour that they are incredibly moved and say they can now picture what happens in our program. They enter expecting to find a sad atmosphere, and instead they leave feeling surprised by the colorful and comforting surroundings at the house, and the stories of hope and inspiration. Visit the Community Tours page for more information.

Please RSVP or make inquiries to:  Kim@childrensroom.org

For families interested in applying to the program:
Please contact michele@childrensroom.org for Family Orientation dates.

The NAGC’s 15th annual symposium took place in Boston this year! This symposium brought together professionals in the child bereavement field to share their best practices concerning programming, research, measurement, fundraising and other topics. This colorful photograph shows artwork created by attendees from our NAGC workshop, “Winter Always Turns to Spring.”

Over 300 representatives from child bereavement programs across the country came together in June to share and learn about the important issues facing the many grieving families we serve.

Staff from The Children’s Room presenting at the symposium included Laurie Moskowitz-Corrois, Deborah Rivlin, and Colleen Shannon.  They are pictured here with Phyllis Silverman (board member and internationally known author and bereavement researcher) as well as our Executive Director, Donna Smith Sharff. Our workshops were well attended and widely appreciated!

We shared an expressive arts activity we had used this spring in our groups as we explored different feelings. The discussion that unfolds is around growth (the petals), support (the stem), comfort (the leaves), and a child or teen being at the center of their own life, with the person who died always being a part of them.

As Laurie Moskowitz-Corrois explains, the metaphor “winter always turns into spring” can become a rich dialogue using the understanding of the seasons to deepen our awareness of the cycles of life and death and personal meaning making.”

Email info@childrensroom.org if you’d like to find out more about our workshop materials. For a detailed description of the expressive arts intervention on Spring Flowers, please click here.

We join communities throughout Massachusetts in honoring the 9/11 Anniversary. Nearly 3,000 children lost a parent who died from the attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Ten years after losing her husband, Teresa Mathai shared some of her memories and reflections with us. “Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, when I heard my husband Joseph Mathai was at a conference at Windows on the World at the WTC and missing after the buildings collapsed, I was in shock and overwhelmed. As a mother with two young kids, I did not know how to break the news to them and how to face the uncertain future ahead. Good friends of ours, Joe and Candy Bergantino, suggested that I call The Children’s Room, which I did. Our family will never forget the kindness and loving support we received from The Children’s Room from those early days of this tragedy, and we will forever be grateful for the continued friendship we have maintained all these years!”

Here at The Children’s Room, we work every day to help support grieving families, and we know that the death of a parent or sibling remains one of society’s least understood and least supported issues. Yet we are inspired daily by stories of courage, and stories of families who turn loss into healing.

Teresa Mathai recently helped Boston families record their memories of loved ones when the 9/11 Memorial Museum visited Boston, through a series of audio recording sessions at The Children’s Room. One of those who shared his story was Franklin Ross, whose father died on 9/11.

Franklin wrote a book of poems to honor his father, and his poetry illustrates how creative expression can transform pain into meaning and beauty. His collection of poetry honors the life of his father Richard Ross, and shines as a beacon of hope for others who have experienced a profound loss. We offer a link so you can read more about the collection of poems by Franklin Ross. Franklin has generously offered to donate part of the proceeds from his book to The Children’s Room.

Two women who have become part of our circle of support at The Children’s Room are Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, who were both widowed on 9/11. Together, Susan and Patti have helped hundreds of widows through the foundation they built together, called  Beyond the 11th . The Children’s Room is grateful for the generous support we have received from the David E. Retik and Christopher D. Mello Foundation, which in turn has helped sustain our programs for grieving families in Massachusetts.

Our Director of Education and Training, Deborah Rivlin, worked with Boston-area 9/11 families for years. In a Boston Globe article this past week, Deborah reflected; “The loss is forever, you are changed forever, but you learn to integrate the loss into your life. There’s an opportunity that comes, in finding ways to make meaning of the loss.”

As a resource to our community, we offer a list of suggestions for talking to your child about the tenth anniversary, recommended by the National Alliance for Grieving Children.

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Children’s Grief Awareness Day is observed every year on the Thursday before Thanksgiving Day. We invite you to take this opportunity to learn more about how children grieve and find resources to help support grieving children in your family or community.

Grief affects more children than most of us realize, and children express their grief in many different ways. Being aware of how children of different ages experience grief can help you educate others in your community about what grieving children need.

One by one, we can create a safe and caring community where grieving children and their families can receive support and the hope that comes from knowing they are not alone.

To learn more about children’s grief, visit our Resources page.

To learn more about Children’s Grief Awareness Day, visit the website for the National Alliance for Grieving Children.

To find out how The Children’s Room can help your school, religious community or other group learn how to support the grieving children you work with, please contact our Director of Education & Training, Deborah Rivlin, at deborah@childrensroom.org.

The Children’s Room will be closed on Thursday, November 24th and Friday, November 25th to observe the Thanksgiving holiday. We will resume our normal business hours starting Monday, November 28th.

We wish everyone a peaceful and restorative time spent with loved ones and great food!

For the second year in a row, The Vivs graciously put on a Holiday Benefit & Bash at the Regent Theater to support The Children’s Room.

Thanks to The Vivs and everyone who came out for this fun evening – the $1,500 you raised supports a child in our program for a year!

The Vivs 2nd Annual

Rock & Roll Holiday Benefit & Bash

for The Children’s Room

featured Big Dipper, Bill Janovitz & Tanya Donelly, The Vivs, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, and The Lesley Ellis Children’s Chorus

also featured The CCC Bell Choir

sponsored by Narragansett Beer  *  Brett Milano Emcee

What inspires someone to run in the Boston Marathon?

We had a great evening in January during our Marathon Kickoff Reception, hearing from this year’s runners: Courtney & Jill (pictured left), Anne, Deana, and Chris. Friends and supporters came to meet our runners and hear about what inspired them to participate in the Marathon in support of children and families at TCR. Click here to learn more about the marathon runners.

The DeVito Family
and
The Children’s Room

Invite you to…
How Parents Can Help Children
Cope with Grief and Loss
Language, Tools and Strategies

Thursday May 10, 2012 • 6:30 P.M.
Arlington Town Hall
700 Massachusetts Ave., Arlington

This educational workshop is open to anyone who would like to better understand their child’s grief. The prior loss of a loved one is not required.

There is no charge to attend and light refreshments will be served. The parking lot behind town hall
(on Academy St.) will be available for your convenience. 

Please RSVP: director@devitofuneralhomes.com or (781) 643-5610

This workshop will be presented by Deborah Rivlin, Director of Education & Training at The Children’s Room. She has over 30 years experience helping grieving children, teens and families. Deborah was an integral part of Boston Medical Center’s Good Grief program from 1988 until 2008 providing in-service trainings and crisis intervention. Deborah developed and served as the director of The CIRCLE, a comprehensive family bereavement support program for 10 years, including support programs for children and adults who had a loved one die on 9/11/01.

Click here to download a pdf flyer for this workshop.