Who Are We?

We are a charity that provides relief to those are in need by reason of bereavement through death, family breakdown, separation, or divorce, through the provision of training and resources to deliver Grief Peer Support Programmes for children and teenagers.

Why Grief Support?

Bereavement affects a person’s emotional, spiritual, physical and mental health and well-being. When they don’t have anyone to talk through their feelings they will often be overwhelmed with a range of emotions.

Our Programmes

Growing Through programmes are peer support group curriculum’s that are biblically based. They are targeted, evidence-based programmes of intervention and prevention, to provide help for children to cope with their grief now, in the early stages, in order to prevent problems stemming from unresolved grief in their future.

Resources

During the upheaval of a deeply emotional time of loss in our lives, we can have a lot of questions or worries that we want to search out answers for. Growing Through may not provide all the answers to those questions but, we hope we can give you some guidance to help you navigate your journey of grief through our informational resources provided here.

Growing Through International

Our International teams, especially on the ground in India and Africa, are frequently facing significant challenges and financial obstacles due to their local culture and dynamics, such as requiring a more visible profile in order to support larger numbers of running groups internationally in third world countries, like India or countries within Africa. It is much more demanding than in the UK due to the need being more numerically extensive and visible. In comparison to the UK, where we can only facilitate a maximum group of fifteen children per course, in these countries, they accommodate hundreds of orphans at any one time when they are running our programmes. Additionally, the expectations are greater in that the leaders are expected to provide a meal for the children as well. They can also experience significant difficulties with their technology systems when facilitating their programmes due to using outdated computers, printers or no internet access and, even the simple task of printing materials can be troublesome due to their excessive cost and lack of equipment. It is to their credit that they have been able to improvise extremely well in order to make the resources available to every child and teen in their areas.

It is well known that their resources can be severely impacted by their finances and reliance on bountiful crop harvests that can potentially fail on a regular basis. The regional trainers there, Pastor Francis in Ghana and Pastor Ravi in India, must find financial resources to be able to travel to the local areas to do the training. With more resources and your support, they can expand the programmes where the need is greatest. Often, although the need is great, local groups cannot afford the kits, the training or the expense of the travel for the trainers to come.  From our perspective as a charity, the cost of sending a kit abroad is extremely expensive and the post is very unreliable to third world countries. Our preferred method of delivering a kit to these countries is to ask someone who is travelling there to take the contents of a kit with them and deliver it to the local trainer in person. 

There are many other ways in which you can help internationally by:

Sponsoring a Pot of Gold Kit

Sponsoring a Rays of Light Kit

Offering to deliver a kit in person*

Sponsoring the cost of training

Sponsor Pastor Francis in Africa*

Paying for food/meals for a local group of children

Paying for fuel to be able to travel and facilitate local groups.

Paying for computer/printer and ink supplies

Paying for the cost of posting a kit internationally

Sponsor Pastor Ravi in India*

* please contact Jewell and Dale Erickson who head up the international side of the organization