Kailey, Program Coordinator at Henry Ford SandCastles joined Detroit Mercy’s Pre-Health Advisor, Carmen Gamlin to discussed this Program and it’s many benefits as well as how Titans can sign up to become a volunteer to start as early as this Summer!
We do support groups. So all the families that comes to us have experienced the death of a loved one. For many of the kids in our program and teens that’s a parent or a sibling…but sometimes it’s another caregiver like a grandparent, aunt or uncle, cousin…
About Sandcastles
SandCastles is a Grief Support Program that offers support to children, teens and families who have experienced the death of a loved one. The organization usually meet at one of their 7 program sites. However, due to the current pandemic, their meetings are now held over Zoom. Meetings are held bi-weekly from 6:30 PM-7:30 PM with a mission to provide grief services in ways that are caring, community and education-based and unique to each child, teen and family.
The kids are kind of grouped with their peers that are around their same age and we do some different activities. Some like crafts, some games…Each kid likes different things. So we try to do like different crafts to try to help them memorialize their person who’s died, or learn like some coping tools, play some different games and just have different discussions to kind of normalize like what it’s like to be a kid and to be experiencing a loss.
Getting Involved!
Becoming a Volunteer at Sand Castles is quite simple! To get started, visit their website at https://aboutsandcastles.org/ there is a get involved tab, you will find the volunteer application and fill that out. Once your application is received at Sandcastles, the organization will perform a background check. After the background check, volunteer applicants will engage in training on how to provide the best coping support to grieving families.
Once you gone through that, if you’re interested in being a facilitator we can put you right in one of our bi-weekly groups. Or we have in August…we’re doing a virtual camp. Normally we do that in person, but this year it will be virtual. Which is kind of like our regular groups but kind of condensed into one weekend and it’s a lot of fun!
For more information on volunteer opportunities or grief support, please visit Sandcastles website!