About Children's Collaborative

The Children’s Collaborative for Healing and Support works to enable the identification of children who have experienced the loss of a parent or caregiver and connect them to appropriate supports.

There is an epidemic of hidden pain in America. Nationwide, one in 14 children will lose a parent or caregiver to death before turning 18.

In 2021 alone, more than 1,100 children a day experienced the death of a parent.* This cruel pain impacts the population with the least capacity to understand and cope with it. The consequences of inaction are severe. Children who experience parental loss are at a higher risk of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress symptoms, dropping out of school, less academic success, lower self-esteem, economic turmoil from housing and food instability, and engaging in risky behaviors.

By strengthening the system to identify and support these children and families, we will be helping all children and families who have experienced loss.

Who We Are

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.

Our Work

The Children’s Collaborative is working to bring hope and healing to young people who have lost a parent or caregiver.

Identify

We will utilize data systems to identify children who have lost a parent using birth, death, and school system data on an ongoing basis

Connect

We will develop durable support networks of local organizations, local/state/federal government resources, and other community partnerships

Support

We will work with local partners to families with those support networks so that they have access to resources along their grief journey.
* “CBEM Reports.” Judi’s House. 1 Mar. 2023, judishouse.org/research-tools/cbem/cbem-reports/.

Join us.

Join our community dedicated to supporting children experiencing loss and learn what you can do to help them and their families.
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