Nationwide Poll of Grieving Families

This letter comes to us on behalf of the
National Alliance for Grieving Children: 

Dear Families:

We are writing today to ask for your help with an important initiative that will help the millions of kids and families coping with the loss of a parent or sibling. As you may be aware, the National Alliance for Grieving Children (NAGC) is the nation’s leading network for bereavement centers. Its mission is to help centers serve kids and families in grief. To that end, the NAGC and the New York Life Foundation have embarked upon a groundbreaking national poll of recently bereaved families regarding their grief experience.

Why are we conducting this poll? While your family understands how hard it is to lose a loved one, childhood grief remains one of society’s most overlooked and least understood issues. This lack of community awareness compounds and lengthens the grief journey that every bereaved family must undergo. By developing a timely, robust body of knowledge around kids’ and parents’ grief experience – and sharing that knowledge broadly – we hope to raise public awareness and understanding of the prevalence and impact of childhood loss. We also hope that this attention will result in better support for kids and families like yours.

We need your help on this critical project!!

Please agree to participate in this confidential survey. Our FAQ for Family Participants page explains the broader campaign, how the poll will work, and why your family’s participation is so important. We would like parents/guardians and children who are currently between the ages of 13 and 19 to participate.

The link below will take you to a website where you will find individual surveys for:
• parents whose spouse or partner has died
• parents whose child has died
• teens whose parent has died 
• teens who had a sibling who died

Please click on the link for the survey that is appropriate to your circumstances and have your children do the same: http://www.gwsurvey.com/grief.html

Have any questions about this survey? Visit the Q&A page as well: http://nationalallianceforgrievingchildren.org/family-poll
Learn more about the NAGC by visiting www.nationalallianceforgrievingchildren.org

Please be assured that participation in this nationwide poll is completely voluntary as well as strictly confidential.

We will only report on total results; under no circumstances will specific responses be linked to any individual or family. Please also know that we will not contact your children directly. We are asking you to ask them to participate by sharing the link to the survey.

Finally, everyone completing the survey will be able to enter this program into a drawing for one of six $500 donations to be made to a child bereavement program.

We understand that this is a particularly busy time of the year and answering questions about the grief journey can be tough. However, I hope your family can assist us with this important effort. We’re convinced that with your help, this research will help stimulate a national conversation on grief and, in the process, powerfully reinforce the urgent need to help the bereaved heal and take their lives forward.

The deadline for completing this survey is the end of July 2011. Please help us today!

Thank you so much for your time and thoughtful consideration of this request – and thank you, as always, for being part of our community.