Ele's Place, Inc.

Currently, Ele's Place houses sites in four major regions of the state of Michigan; the Ann Arbor metro area, West Michigan, the Capital Region, and Flint/Genessee County Region. In addtion to these four sites, Ele's Place hosts Ele's Group in more than 75 Elementary, Middle and High Schools across the state. These sites and schools attempt to reach and serve, at no cost to the families, children and teens who have experienced the death of some one close to them. Ele's Place has no religious affiliation, nor do we turn anyone away for their relationship to the person who died or type of death. We are fully inclusive of all families and children and teens of all needs.

Ele's Place utilizes a nationally recognized peer support program for children ages 3-18 and young adults to 25 years old, to allow them to process and normalize the feelings they experience as they grieve the death of someone close to them. This peer support, utilized in both our on site bereavement programming, as well as our school based programming, allows children to not only identify their own feelings, but also diminishes the feelings of isolation children feel after a death. We are able to administer these programs with a small staff of licensed clinicians, as well as nearly 500 volunteers across the state who dedicate 20+ hours to training, in order to learn the best way to serve our kids and teens. Once training is completed, the volunteers are asked to commit to one year of service to our families, in order to provide a level of consistency which can often be lacking for families following a death.

With nearly 30 years of providing children's grief support in Michigan, we are able to not only look back on data we have collected from our families, but also speak to many of them as adults to determine the benefit of Ele's Place in their lives. Additionally, we are able to do pre and post program surveys to see what changes in behavior have occurred in children and families during their time in our program. Consistently, these surveys state positive changes in children's behavior, sleep patterns, school work and relationships.

Over the course of our nearly 30 year history, Ele's Place has been able to serve more than 25,000 individuals, and expand into three additional markets outside of our headquarters. As we look to the future, we seek new and creative ways to continue to serve those in our current geographic areas, but will also provide support to those who are both outside and in between the current areas we serve. We anticipate doing this through expansion, of relationships with existing children's grief support centers, as well as through potential growth of our own facilities.