The
New York Life Foundation identified a critical gap in systematically identifying bereaved children and families and connecting them with essential resources. Through their visionary approach and strategic funding, they have been instrumental in supporting the Children’s Collaborative, creating a structured, sustainable framework to bridge these gaps. Their efforts ensure that grieving children are identified, supported, and connected to valuable resources, fostering a stronger, more compassionate network of care.
The Children’s Collaborative for Healing and Support was launched as an initiative of
COVID Collaborative, an organization founded in 2020 to bring together leading experts in health, education, and the economy to help win the fight against COVID-19. As we explored the impact of the pandemic, we made a harrowing discovery – the disease had robbed hundreds of thousands of children of their parent or caregiver. Since 2020, more than 340,000 have been impacted by this loss.
COVID Collaborative issued a report on this unseen crisis –
Hidden Pain: Children Who Lost a Parent or Caregiver to COVID-19 and What the Nation Can Do To Help Them – and launched the Hidden Pain initiative in 2021 to support these COVID-bereaved children.
We assembled a powerful community of nonprofits, social service providers, educators, counselors, funeral directors, faith-based leaders, and private sector partners ready to help these children and their families. Yet because there was no system in place to identify the young people experiencing this loss, we found that these resources were being underutilized and not reaching the children that needed them most.
It became clear that by solving this problem – identifying children, and connecting them to supports – we could undertake an effort to improve systems that would help
all bereaved children, regardless of the circumstances that caused parental loss.
In 2023, the COVID Collaborative re-launched Hidden Pain as the
Children’s Collaborative for Healing and Support, in order to enable the identification of all children who have experienced the loss of a parent or caregiver and connect them to appropriate supports.
