Warrendale/Cranberry PA
Photographs
Located in fastest-growing region of Pennsylvania in the Warrendale and Cranberry region north of Pittsburgh, the Highmark Caring Place in Warrendale opened its doors in April, 2009. The program itself began the previous fall, with the first session meeting at Orchard Hill Church.
The Caring Place is a safe place with safe people where grieving children
and families come together to find hope.
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Grieving families join other families at the Caring Place so that children of all ages, as well as adults, can meet together with their peers who have also experienced a death. Fifteen to 20 families come together for ten meetings every other week over four or five months.
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Support services for the families, along with dinner, are provided at no cost to the families. The Caring Place is supported by community contributions, matched dollar for dollar by Highmark Blue Shield. |
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Teens meet together with their peers, and with trained adult volunteers, to share together their memories, their feelings and their experiences. |
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Traveling their roads of grief together, middle-school-age children gather for fun times and deep times, able to laugh together and cry together after they've built trust in each other. |
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Young-school-age children are encouraged by trained adult volunteers to find many ways to express their grief, from art, puppets, and telling stories, to writing on the wall-boards and sharing photographs of the person who died. |
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All members of a family come to the Caring Place, including the youngest. |
Parents and guardians of the children who come also attend, sharing their
own grief with one another, as well as the ups and downs of living as a single
parent or holding the household together after a child has died.
"It is only natural that we and our children find many things hard to talk about. But anything human is mentionable and anything mentionable can be manageable. The mentioning can be difficult, and the managing too, but both can be done if we're surrounded by love and trust."
—Fred Rogers,
Honorary Chairman, Caring Foundation
from 1985 until his death in 2003
