Ele's Place, Inc.

Ele's Place aims to ensure that no child in the state of Michigan grieves alone, or lacks access to compassionate grief suppport. There are over 20,000 children in our current service areas alone who have experienced the death of someone close to them. This number does not take into account the children and teens outside of our current service area, who are eligible to recieve our services, but our precluded from doing so do to distance, or time.

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.

Over the course of our 30 year history, Ele's Place has been able to serve more than 30,000 individuals, and expand into three additional markets outside of our headquarters. Additionally, as a response to the Coronavirus pandemic, Ele's Place has worked to shift our program, training and fundraising models and have done so successfully. 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. The COVID-19 pandemic has required us to provide our services virtually and as such, we are able to reach several children for whom there were barriers to service before. This was a goal we were not certain we would be able to reach for at least a several years.