This is a small sample of the available organizations out there who can help. Peruse any of them and you will find links to even more.

Along with organizations, you can find an extensive list of links to articles, videos, books, and more on our Resources page.

  • Zen Hospice Project – The Zen Hospice Project provided hospice care for individuals of any or no religion who are looking for a compassionate end to their life. Even though the hospice house closed in 2018 but the Project continues to train and coordinate volunteers who provide nonsectarian, non-medical care to residents of the hospice and palliative care ward at Laguna Honda Hospital.
  • Orphan Wisdom – Founded by Stephen Jenkinson (the “Griefwalker”), a philosopher and accomplished speaker who is “redefining what it means to live and die well.”
  • Option B – A collection of the site’s best essays and resources here – “OptionB.Org is dedicated to helping you build resilience in the face of adversity—and giving you the tools to help your family, friends, and community build resilience too. Here, you can read and share personal stories, join groups for solidarity and support, and find information from experts.”
  • The Dinner Party – “Ours is a community of mostly 20- and 30-somethings who’ve each experienced significant loss and connect around potluck dinner parties to talk about it.” Dinner Party tables take place all over the world.
  • Grief Recovery Institute – Blog – Comprehensive resource for working within the Grief Recovery Model. Connect with a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist online or in person.
  • Soaring Spirits International – “Widowed people created Soaring Spirits because we discovered that connecting with other widowed people made the challenges of surviving a spouse or partner a little easier to manage. There is a widowed community here at Soaring Spirits that offers widowed men and women understanding, friendship, inspiration, and encouragement as they learn to live without the person with whom they intended to spend the rest of their lives.
  • Modern Loss – “Modern Loss is a place to share the unspeakably taboo, unbelievably hilarious, and unexpectedly beautiful terrain of navigating your life after a death. Beginners welcome.” Features essays, resources, news, and links. Contains resources specific to different losses.
  • Glow in the Woods – A site for baby lost families (neonatal and postpartum death). Contains blog posts, resources, an excellent bookshelf of recommended readings.
  • Liz Logelin Foundation – “We are dedicated to providing support to grief-stricken young families in their time of deepest need. When a parent dies the financial burden can be huge. The LLF awards monetary grants to meet families’ emotional and financial short-term needs.”
  • TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) – “The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors offers compassionate care to all those grieving the loss of a military loved one.”
  • Portland Institute for Loss and Transition – “Drawing on a large and growing body of contemporary research and clinical scholarship, a Meaning Reconstruction approach to grief therapy gives you the tools to work alongside clients struggling with intense and prolonged grief, as you learn to listen between the lines of the stories they tell themselves and others about the loss, and find the seeds of new beginnings.”
  • The Center for Complicated Grief – “Troubling thoughts, dysfunctional behaviors or problems regulating emotions get a foothold and stall adaptation. Complicated grief is the condition that occurs when this happens. People with complicated grief don’t know what’s wrong.[…]People often think this is depression but complicated grief and depression are not the same thing.” More on Shear’s Complicated Grief Theory.

Child-Focused Grief Organizations

  • National Alliance for Grieving Children – National experts and resources for children experiencing grief.
  • Dougy Center – International experts in children’s grief, and some of the only professionals invited in after large-scale disasters.
  • Comfort Zone Camp – “Comfort Zone Camp is a nonprofit 501(c)3 bereavement organization that transforms the lives of children who have experienced the death of a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver. Our programs are free of charge and include confidence building activities and age-based support groups that break the emotional isolation grief often brings. Comfort Zone’s programs are offered to children ages 5-25, and their families for the family programs.” Similar bereavement camps exist throughout the country.
  • Speaking Grief – This page offers a helpful list of resources for childhood bereavement.
  • The MISS Foundation – “The MISS Foundation, established in 1996 by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, is an international 501(c)3, volunteer based organization providing C.A.R.E. [counseling, advocacy, research, and education] services to families experiencing the death of a child.”
  • The Order of the Good Death – “The Order is about making death a part of your life. Staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not.” Well-run website with videos, articles, links, art, etc.
  • Death Over Dinner – “This project was created as a gift, an invitation and a simple set of tools to help families and friends address the basic human fact that we are all, at some point, going to die. We suffer more when we don’t communicate our wishes, we suffer less when we know how to honor the wishes of our loved ones. As we build greater comfort and literacy around this important topic, every single one of us wins.” Resources for hosting a death conversation-themed dinner party.
  • Death Cafes – “At a Death Cafe people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives.” Takes place all over the country.
  • You’re Going to Die – “A 501(c)3 nonprofit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death & dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality.”
  • Let’s Reimagine – “Reimagine End of Life is a community-wide exploration of death and celebration of life through creativity and conversation. Drawing on the arts, spirituality, healthcare, and design, we create weeklong series of events that break down taboos and bring diverse communities together in wonder, preparation, and remembrance.” The organization hosts two weeklong festivals in New York and San Francisco each year.
  • The Conversation Project – “The Conversation Project is a public engagement initiative with a goal that is both simple and transformative: to have every person’s wishes for end-of-life care expressed and respected.” Website contains a free starter kit for talking with loved ones as well as a host of other resources.
  • The Art of Dying – “The Art of Dying Institute, an initiative of the New York Open Center is dedicated to fostering an engaged community of practitioners; researchers & scholars; educators; front-line innovators; partners; and investors to address the need for a cultural awakening around the theme of death, how we die, and the consequences for how we live.”
  • Morbid Anatomy – (features lots of books and links)A long-running blog that “surveys the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.”

Again, these organizations are a sampling of what’s out there. If you are in need of help, there are people out there who are eager to show support. Our hope is that this list can help you find what you need, and launch you into finding the right group/organization. Do not lost hope of none of those listed above are right for you.

And please be sure to check out our Resources page (the button below). It’s full of tools – books, videos, articles – and references that would be helpful to anyone, at any level of dealing with Grief.

Next Up: Resources and Tools for Grief, Loss, Death, and Dying