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| The iwl team with Jill Macfarlane,
Development Director at The Sharing Place.
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2015: New year, new opportunities to give back to the community via our monthly initiatives from inwhatlanguage Cares!
This January, we have started the year with a bang by helping The Sharing Place, an organization that hosts fourteen age-appropriate grief support groups for children ages 3-18 and their parents twice monthly. For nearly 2 decades, The Sharing Place has been fulfilling its mission to “provide a safe and caring environment for grieving children, teens, and their families to share their feelings while healing themselves,” as one can read in its official website.
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| Maurice van Zutphen, hard at work! |
And inwhatlanguage Cares has not missed the chance to provide them with a little help so that they can continue with this wonderful task for many years to come in the best conditions possible.
The Sharing Place is a non-profit organization that receives no state funding and is ran mostly by volunteers, so they can and gladly accepts any help they can get, particularly with maintaining the building.
And this has been iwl’s mission for this month! Some members of the core team went to the Sharing Place last week to install cupboards, hooks, storage units, and whatever was needed.
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| Abel Atwater, helping with iwl Cares for the first time! |
“I fell in love with The Sharing Place,” comments iwl Cares organizer Karlie Bodine. “The house is amazing and the staff is wonderful, I am so happy we got to help them and the children and their families that go there.”
“We helped redo a room that they call their ‘soft room’,” Karlie explains. “This room serves as a dress up and play area for toddlers because reenactment and pretend play is a huge part of the grieving process for young children, as Jill Macfarlane, the Development Director at The Sharing Place told us. We redid this room by installing hooks for all their costumes and we bought and put together a set to make a vanity for their closet for more pretend play. We also bought storage units for this room and the bathroom to help make things nice and organized for their staff. Lastly, we installed wires along the walls of the Teen Room for them to hang their art. Art is another way of grieving as it is one of the biggest forms of expression!”
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| This is the room that the iwl team helped build! Not bad, huh? |
For Abel Atwater, iwl’s newest team member, this was his first iwl Cares experience, and he enjoyed a lot. For Atwater, the iwl Cares initiatives have actually had a lot to do with his wish to work at inwhatlanguage: “This program is one of the things that attracted me to inwhatlanguage in the first place, the opportunity to serve, make a difference and give back.”
All in all, this particular initiative has been extremely especial, according to Karlie Bodine. Not only it is the first of the New Year, and it has involved one of our newest team members for the first time, but it has also given iwl the opportunity to improve children’s lives. “Many of us at inwhatlanguage have a soft spot for children so our team was delighted to help in any way we can,” smiles Karlie. “We know our service will benefit many children for years to come!”
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