About the Nonprofit
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OUR HOUSE Grief Support Center was founded with the mission to provide the community with grief support services, education, resources, and hope. For three decades, OUR HOUSE has helped thousands of children, teens, and adults in Los Angeles County find healing after the death of someone close. We provide essential grief support that recognizes the universality of grief and normalizes grief emotions. Our vision is to create a world in which grief is embraced, understood, and respected.
OUR HOUSE recognizes that each person’s grief is unique in its intensity and duration, and that commonalities of experience strengthen the value of a grief support group in helping to address the symptoms of grief. Our programs have grown with the needs of the community, serving a diverse population of grievers throughout Greater Los Angeles. We are committed to making grief support available to families with limited financial and transportation resources, as well as other life challenges, particularly in our programs that serve children and Spanish-speaking adults, most of whom are from low-income households. Our work currently comprises four core service areas:
- Grief support groups for children, teens, and adults in English and Spanish at our West L.A. and Woodland Hills centers and 80 satellite sites, including the Karsh Center in Mid-City/Koreatown and public school and community partner locations throughout Los Angeles County.
- Camp Erin grief camp weekends for children and teens.
- Grief education for teachers, doctors, nurses, medical students, mental health professionals, social workers, and clergy members.
- On-site grief responses for short-term support after a death in a business or school.
OUR HOUSE is the only grief support center in Southern California that offers this scope, volume, and breadth of continuous grief support services for children, teens, and adults and educational programs for professionals. We utilize a cost-efficient, volunteer-driven model in which we maintain a lean staff of 23 full- and part-time personnel and annually employ the services of 200-500 volunteers and 6-12 MSW interns. In 2022, we served, reached, and educated more than 11,000 people.
We carefully nurture landmark partnerships with school districts and community mental health professionals to multiply the impact of our services through education, advocacy, and training. OUR HOUSE continues to deepen our thought partnership within national networks of childhood bereavement support providers, including the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), the National Alliance for Children’s Grief (NACG), the Coalition to Support Grieving Students (CSGS), the Eluna Network of Camp Erin grief camps, and many others. Our current program expansion is focused on increasing access to grief support while advancing the principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
