The Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families supports children, youth, and families as they grieve and grow. We believe grief is a natural response to loss. We provide safe and caring spaces where children and families can connect and discover their own path towards healing.

The Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families (KCGCF) is a 501c3 founded in 2020 by Leila Salisbury, a parent of a twice-bereaved child, began her experience with children’s grief support as a client in another state and aligned the KCGCF with effective national children's grief support models. In 2021, KCGCF launched a pilot program with 7 Fayette County FRYSC offices, expanding to 26 schools by 2024 and beginning new school-based work in Madison and Scott counties. In 2022, KCGCF was selected as one of 30 bereavements centers nationwide for the Judi’s House/JAG Institute Changemakers Program to enhance program evaluation. In 2023, KCGCF piloted an 8-week peer support program with University of Kentucky Athletics, which expanded in 2024 to become a university-wide program, funded by a UK Women in Philanthropy grant. UK now sustains its college student grief support program that the KCGCF helped found. Since 2022, the KCGCF also runs year-round family grief support groups for children ages 3-18 (and parents/caregivers) who have experienced a significant loss.
KCGCF’s school-based grief support groups and trainings help students cope with deaths of parents or significant people in their lives and with the emotions that accompany those losses. Opportunities for peer support, learning coping strategies, and connecting in nonjudgmental spaces have been shown to improve mental health outcomes for bereaved youth, who are at higher risk for substance use disorders and mental health issues, specifically depression and anxiety. KCGCF also trains educators and school staff in how to identify and support grieving students, addressing a significant gap in children’s grief resources and professional development for educators.
Currently, the Center serves 425+ children and adults annually in 7 counties. It runs 35-45 school-based programs, 1 family grief support program, 2 college-based groups, statewide training and advocacy work each year. The team includes 2 full-time and 2 part-time employees; 17 contract facilitators, 4 under/graduate interns. Annual budget runs approximately $340k per year.

• Arts Education/Youth Arts
• Visual Arts

The Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families (KCGCF) is requesting $4,000 to host a series of hands-on art workshops for children and teens who have experienced the grief of the loss of a significant person in their lives (can be a death loss or parental separation).

Project Activities: The project will support 6-7 one-and-a-half to two-hour sessions occurring between January and April of 2027, with sessions facilitated by a combination of participating artists, trained volunteers, and mental health clinicians who will guide student creation of work in a variety of mediums. At the program events, students will engage in trauma-informed art activities that help participants both process loss and identify and embrace new strengths, supporters, and goals. Sessions will include such projects as Legacy Lanterns, Strength Shields, River of Support maps, Tree of Growth, Weather Inside watercolors, and Hope Flags. The events will take place in conjunction with KCGCF participating families in their bi-monthly family grief support group meetings at Tates Creek Christian Church; as part of the school-based grief support groups the KCGCF runs in several Fayette County Public School K-12 sites as a “bonus” group meeting; and as free events open to youth 6-18 in community spaces such as the Lexington Public Library, Woodhill Community Center, and LFUCG/Parks and Recreation community centers. The KCGCF is also developing a partnership with several African American churches (with host site as St. John Missionary Baptist Church) for an expansion of its family grief support programming. One of the open art events will be at this location to engage families of color in a complementary mode of grief support. Pre-registration will be taken for these free events (though no one showing up at the last minute will be turned away) and different types of art activities will be chosen for different age and skill levels. Students will have 2-3 choices of art activities involving paint, paper, fiber, and clay (a particularly therapeutic sensory experience for grieving children who often struggle with anxiety and self-regulation). The facilitators will walk the students through the choices of projects and assist the students as needed. The KCGCF clinician will also be on hand to give a brief introduction as to how the activities the students see in front of them can help them with naming and coping with strong emotions, keeping important memories alive, and understanding they are not alone in their grief and loss.

3-4 artists will be selected to work with the students during the therapeutic art sessions. The KCGCF has already worked with artist Christine Cetrulo on a project funded through the Arts in Healthcare initiative, and we would approach her again as she worked well with and received positive feedback from students. We would also approach Seth Tuska, as he has done similar work with students in school settings and knows how to conduct and structure those programs. We will also seek out two artists of color to make sure program staff align with the demographics of the population being served by the program.

Participating students from all of the offered art events (with caregiver permission) can select to have their created work shown as part of a dedicated exhibit at the May 20 Gallery Hop at the First Presbyterian Church exhibit site. The KCGCF director has met with the church art committee and they have agreed to host the exhibit. The KCGCF will work with the church's exhibit committee to create a description for the exhibit that reveals both the difficult and hopeful themes the students are engaged with in their work. The KCGCF will work with families to create tags for the pieces that honor the family's wishes as to the identification of the student artists (they will be given the option to display the art with the artist's name remaining anonymous) and description of the pieces. The KCGCF committee working on the exhibit project will also invite selected local artists (those who have helped facilitate the student programs and other artists with pieces relevant to the topic of the show) to have chosen works displayed at the exhibit. This has the benefit of including artists who have worked with the youth and having the work of professional artists shown at the exhibit. This will help ensure that attendees will be drawn to view the work of both professional and student artists.

1 in 9 Kentucky Children will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 18, but there are few spaces where grief and loss can be safely and openly worked with and processed. Many children do not want to talk about their loss initially with others, and younger children often process more effectively through tangible, hands-on activities. This art-based support program will allow students of many ages to engage and express at a level at which they are comfortable (there will be choice around sharing and discussing student work). This trauma-informed and strengths-based approach is particularly well suited to children who have experienced traumatic or stigmatized losses (to homicide, suicide, or overdose). These programs offer opportunities to accept the reality of the loss, share memories, and create a sense of ongoing connection with those who are gone. The art pieces will also be shared with caregivers, creating points of conversational connection between the grieving youth and their adults at home. Psychoeducational/resource materials will be sent home with caregivers after the programs. Through the art created, this program will create conversational openings between child and caregiver, in addition to fostering supportive, non-judgmental peer connections with other young people with loss.

Youth who experience a significant death loss or separation are exponentially more likely to experience future substance; have lower overall educational attainments; have a much higher risk of death by suicide; experience depression and anxiety and higher rates than non-bereaved peers; and experience poorer physical health outcomes. By investing in this targeted and tailored prevention programming with impacted children and teens, the community will benefit by having fewer young people experience the negative outcomes often associated with loss. This KCGCF programming will reach youth already engaged in grief support programming, teaching that arts engagement is a valuable tool in their coping and healing toolkit. Through external partnerships with other community programs and nonprofits, new students will be connected to KCGCF support programs in an appealing, non-threatening, and creative environment. The Gallery Hop exhibit will allow young people with loss to share with family, friends, and those viewing the exhibit a vision of the struggles they experience and also the hope and growth opportunities they have cultivated with individual and community support. The exhibit will also help encourage much-needed public conversations around how Lexington’s youth are impacted by loss and what creative and other programs can do to support these young people as they move forward.

The KCGCF promotes its programs on social media, Facebook, its own website, and through school and community partners (such as Partners for Youth, Family Resource and Youth Service Center coordinators for FCPS, and LFUCG councilperson weekly online newsletters). The art programs will also be promoted through the KCGCF mailing list of nearly 1000 school, community, and mental health professionals. The art show will be promoted through marketing support for the Gallery Hop, exhibit host First Presbyterian’s mailing list of more than 1000 individuals, and the director of the Center will promote the event through news coverage. The timing of the exhibit falls between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and the media hook will highlight that as a difficult time of year for children and teens with loss, promoting the exhibit as a positive conversation starter around one of our state’s most significant population health challenges for young people.

The program will be offered to two groups of youth ages 6-18 who already engaged with KCGCF programming: youth who attend the family grief support groups for children with death loss, and youth participating in school-based KCGCF grief support groups.. The target audience for this program are youth with death loss (as identified by such partner organizations as Big Brothers Big Sisters) and those with parental separations (participants will be recognized and engaged through partners such as Amachi and FCPS Family Resource Coordinators, who develop close and trusted relationships with families and are often aware of changed family circumstances and barriers to school and family success). For the exhibit itself, the KCGCF will promote the event widely in order to attract a diverse audience of individuals who care not only about art but also about community health, children, and their outcomes.

The project coordinators will work with LexArts (via its artists roster and the connections made through participation in LexArts’ Arts and Health Alliance group) to identify a diverse set of artists to work with students. Particularly for students served through the KCGCF school-based program, who are largely students of color, it will be important to match students with working artists who look like them. The KCGCF will also work with Treyton Blackburn, Extension Agent for Community Arts at UK, to help identify and match artists with the profile of the student being served at each of the art events. Research has shown that youth of color experience the loss of significant people at higher rates and at earlier ages than their white counterparts, so validating the experiences of youth of color and creating connections with a working professional artist will be critically important.

For this program, the KCGCF will work through already established relationships with its school partners. It will also partner with Amachi and Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bluegrass to offer the program to their child/mentor matches. Both programs serve children with separations (Amachi serves youth impacted by parental incarceration, and BBBS noted that last year 20% of their matches were registered for their program because of parental deaths). The KCGCF has talked with both organizations about partner opportunities and both are eager to be able to offer free structured program opportunities for their child/mentor matches to attend for their weekly required time together. The KCGCF also has a longstanding relationship with Bluegrass Care Navigators, wherein each trusted organization promotes family programming opportunities to the other. The project will also work closely with St. John Missionary Baptist Church and the new family grief support program that will begin there in January 2027, as well as longtime partner ONE Lexington so that the program can be promoted to youth who have experienced losses from gun violence. Finally, the Center will also promote and work in partnership with UK’s #IChampionHealth program, a project designed to promote mental health tools and substance use prevention. This program has done impressive work reaching underserved communities, and the KCGCF director has served on their advisory board for several years. #IChampionHealth will be another key partner in reaching local youth in specific underserved neighborhoods and promoting this program (with the possibility of one of the program events being done in conjunction with an event they are hosting).

The KCGCF wants grieving young people to know there are many paths to healing. Art engagement can help a young person map a past and dream a future reality in ways that feel safe and connective. Lexington’s youth, especially those of limited economic means and those who have experienced stigmatized or difficult losses, desperately need these guided, creative, and grief-sensitive program opportunities that move them into spaces of post-traumatic growth.
One of the key goals of the KCGCF is to improve the experiences and outcomes of grieving children and families. Multiple studies have shown that art engagement decreases anxiety and helps children integrate thoughts and physical sensations related to grief and can soothe overwhelming feelings. The proposed project directly correlates to the goal of creating new positive experiences and outlets for grieving children and families it serves and will also be a way to increase community and artist engagement in future KCGCF programming.

Program evaluation will utilize a mixed-methods approach incorporating participant feedback, facilitator observations, and program documentation. Following each therapeutic art experience, participants will complete a brief anonymous survey assessing the extent to which the activity supported emotional expression, fostered connection with others who have experienced loss, introduced art as a coping strategy, and provided a meaningful overall experience. Participants will also have the opportunity to provide open-ended feedback regarding the impact of the program.

Facilitators will complete a standardized observation form following each event documenting participant engagement, implementation of planned activities, evidence of emotional expression and peer connection, and any adaptations made to meet participant needs. Program activities will be documented through attendance records, facilitator notes, lesson plans, and photographs of the events and artwork (with appropriate permissions). At the conclusion of the project, quantitative survey data and qualitative feedback will be analyzed to evaluate program quality, participant reach, achievement of project goals, and the effectiveness of therapeutic arts programming in supporting bereaved children and families. (See attached document for the evaluation questions.)

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