Healing With Play is part of “Building Resilience Together: Strengthening Children’s Museums for Bereaved Families”, a collaborative project led by ACM, New York Life Foundation, and Knology. The project builds on the critical support children’s museums provide to individuals and communities dealing with loss and grief. More details on the project are below.
Building Resilience Together seeks to help children’s museums discover new ways to support bereaved children and families in their communities. We are currently in the pilot phase of the project, working with a small group of children’s museums and bereavement experts to create field-wide resources and support systems.
According to data from Judi’s House, 1 in 12 children will experience the death of either a parent or sibling by the time they turn eighteen. Rates of bereavement are even higher for children in racially and ethnically minoritized groups, and for those in socioeconomically marginalized families.
Children’s museums can help facilitate bereaved children’s grieving processes. Studies show that bereavement care is most effective when supported by adults who meet youth where they are in their natural environments—including schools, afterschool programs, clinical facilities, and sites of recreation and informal learning. Children’s museums have a great deal of experience when it comes to helping children and families cope with loss, and are well positioned to provide bereavement care to those grieving the death of a loved one. Because they offer families a safe place for conversation, emotional expression, and embodied learning, much of the work children’s museums are already doing speaks to the needs of bereaved children— whether acknowledged as such or not. Building Resilience Together seeks to advance the range of ways children’s museums serve bereaved families.
The goal of the project’s first phase is to identify effective practices for supporting bereaved families—and to devise strategies for making these practices more intentional and widespread across the children’s museum field. As a first step toward that goal, we’re documenting both the needs of bereaved children and the role children’s museums can play in providing for these needs. Through a literature review and conversations with an advisory cohort of 10 children’s museums, we’re creating a series of Trends reports to document our findings and recommendations. To learn more about these reports, see our Resources page.
We’ve also created a field-wide survey to learn more about how children’s museums are currently supporting bereaved children families — along with bereaved staff members. If you work in an executive capacity at a children’s museum, we’d love to hear from you! To complete this short, 10-15 minute survey,
The project’s second phase focuses on raising awareness of how children’s museums can support the needs of bereaved families. Having identified practices and strategies for addressing these needs, our goal is to promote the use of existing bereavement-related resources, tools, and professional development opportunities across the field. These efforts culminate during Children’s Grief Awareness Month in 2025, during which we and the members of our advisory cohort work together to raise awareness of childhood bereavement among children’s museum staff and the communities they serve.
On a broader level, the project seeks to create a group of bereavement experts in the children’s museum field, and to help the children’s museums’ field become a key community resource for families experiencing grief, loss, and trauma. By building the field’s capacities in these ways we aim to help families dealing with loss move from bereavement toward resilience.
