By Atharva Welin
For almost 75 years the Parmenter Foundation, based in Wayland, has sought to preserve community health and well-being in the Metrowest area. In recent years, that mission has focused on awarding grants to organizations providing end-of-life care and bereavement support to all ages.
Now, the foundation has launched a homegrown grief support initiative aimed at one demographic in particular: college students. UGrieve is the initial concept that materialized a couple years ago when the foundation attempted to address yet another underserved niche within grief assistance – coping with the loss of a pet.
While building and promoting that program, Parmenter’s Manager of Communications and Programs Jennifer Siegal was approached by an associate dean of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, who had a problem. “He said to me, ‘I have students who are having losses in their families and I don’t know how to support them; I just don’t know what to do,’” Siegal said. “Think of all the unique issues: these students are away from their families, they’re away from their support systems, they don’t know how to navigate [and] they don’t know who to call when there is a death.”
Siegal researched the issue and concluded that despite the push for more mental health support in universities in recent years, most schools did not have dedicated programs to support grieving students. Instead, students who experience a loss find themselves juggling their emotional turmoil with a complicated, sometimes opaque process of reaching out to each of their individual professors and relevant school administrators for time off. With that point in mind, she and her colleagues began to formulate how Parmenter could respond.
“This is not for students to call us and get therapy. What we figured out we can do is try to build what we’re calling ‘compassionate campuses,’” Siegal said. “Campuses that are at least ready and willing and understanding that they need to support these students and have ideas in place, policies, (and) accommodations that are somewhat written down or understood (as to) how to support them.”
UGrieve thus far is a collection of videos, currently in its pilot phase, but soon to be readily available for widespread use on college campuses. The collection consists of two free series – one directed at students and one directed at university faculty and staff members.
The speakers in the videos are professional authors who have written extensively about grief after having dealt with it themselves. Rebecca Soffer, co-founder and CEO of the grief publication “Modern Loss” narrates the student-oriented video series, while Colin Campbell, college professor and author of “Finding the Words Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose,” does so for the faculty-oriented series.
Candace Hetzner is a longtime Wayland resident who spent 22 years as a part-time professor of Political Science and associate dean for graduate academic affairs in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. The recent retiree has been involved with the Parmenter Foundation for more than a decade, eventually joining its development committee and board of trustees. Her experiences with grieving students over the course of her career make her particularly hopeful that UGrieve can help faculty and staff members better empathize when they encounter such situations.
“The issue here is that human beings differ greatly in their emotional intelligence, their empathy and their capacity to relate to students, and therefore you find a wide spectrum of responsiveness,” Hetzner said. “What amazed me about what Parmenter has done here with UGrieve is that they’ve got two very sophisticated people presenting and they managed to give very practical advice (which) I think will be valuable for almost any faculty member. Particularly if the person has difficulty relating to this kind of student trauma, there are some really good guidelines that aren’t patronizing, they’re just reasonable and very straightforward.”
Even as a dean, Hetzner was unsure exactly what to do when she encountered a student with a complex story around a loss in the family, which piqued her initial interest in UGrieve. When she, like Siegal, began investigating other universities to research their resources for students dealing with bereavement, she found a total lack of standardization or any programmed set of procedures. Now, she hopes to see UGrieve spread nationwide with the help of its donors and partners and become that go-to standard procedure for students and faculty alike.
“It astonished me that there is this kind of lacuna in universities across the country, and I think that’s why this has been so well-received,” Hetzner said. “I know the ways in which I have searched for the right things to do or say, and I think that those videos do a marvelous job at helping a student who’s 18 years old and may have a roommate who’s just experienced a loss to be the right kind of supportive individual.”
On top of these video series, Parmenter has also partnered with the Jordan Porco Foundation, a Connecticut-based nonprofit focused on youth mental health suicide prevention. It runs an initiative known as Fresh Check Days, operating in more than 350 colleges in 45 states. During these days, participating universities can choose from a menu of student-oriented interactive booths focused on different aspects of mental health to feature on their campuses and beginning in January a UGrieve booth operated by Parmenter will be one of the options.
“A lot of times, especially on a college campus, if someone dies, the other students don’t know what to say and so they run the other way, so that adds to the isolation as well,” Siegal said. “So that’s what we’re trying to solve in the student videos; if you don’t know what to say, just say something. We give examples of what you can say like, ‘I’m here for you,’ or just bring them lunch one day. Just them knowing that you are thinking about them goes so much further than students think.”
For further information contact:
jsiegal@parmenterfoundation.org
Jennifer Siegal 508-561-7582
jsiegal@parmenterfoundation.org
Candace Hetzner 617-251-4825
hetzner@verizon.net
