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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!”
