About | WNY Compassion Connection Center

Purpose

Our Mission

The mission of WNY Compassion Connection is to help grieving children and families navigate their journey to healing and resilience through the power of peer support and grief literacy within a safe, caring environment and through building up a grief sensitive community.

Path

Our Vision

We envision a place where every grieving child and family finds the support, understanding, and resources they need to navigate their grief journey. We aim to create a community where healing, resilience, and hope flourish, empowering young people and families to thrive despite their loss.

Our Principal Beliefs

Every child deserves the right to grieve in a supportive and understanding environment, connecting with others facing shared feelings of loss.

Every individual has the capacity to heal.

Duration and intensity of grief is individual and unique; every person deserves to have their grief witnessed, shared, and understood.

Grief literacy within our schools, workplaces, and community is essential to creating a compassionate society that understands how to best support the bereaved.

Connect With Us

If you’re ready to join peers with similar grief experiences, we’re here to talk. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you navigate the first step forward.

JOIN US

Volunteer With Us

WNY Compassion Connection is only possible with the help of our trained, compassionate volunteers. Learn more about how you can contribute to the healing journeys of families and join our mission.

VOLUNTEER

History

Our Story

WNY Compassion Connection is a grant-funded organization created to address the intense need for a brick-and-mortar grief center in the Western New York community.

Created and operated by the team behind P.U.N.T. Pediatric Cancer Collaborative, WNY Compassion Connection was initially born out of a desire to expand their bereavement programs for families experiencing the loss of a child to cancer.

Our Purpose

Since 2013, P.U.N.T. Pediatric Cancer Collaborative has stepped up to meet the needs of grieving parents and siblings who have suffered a loss to pediatric cancer through a network of peer support. Time and time again, we have witnessed the sacred relief and peace of those transcendent moments where vacant eyes of broken parents bearing the depths of unspeakable pain could finally lock eyes with another who has walked in their shoes, and with barely a word being uttered, find the gift of true understanding.

We now know that 1 in 11 children in WNY will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 18. Bereaved children are at higher risk of every negative outcome including mental health issues, substance use, academic difficulties, behavioral changes and even early mortality. Grieving parents and caregivers struggle to support these children as they are in the depth and darkness of their own pain.

Believing that no family should be alone to navigate the death of a loved one, we are creating a safe, dedicated place that promotes health and well-being, where kids and families can heal together at no cost. WNY Compassion Connection provides a supportive, empathetic haven for grieving children and families. Through outreach, we are also an active beacon of grief literacy and education without our region's schools, workplaces and community. Together, this place and related efforts will foster hope, resilience, and a healthy path forward for children suffering the pain of loss through every developmental stage and will serve as an additional antidote to the devastation and incapacitation of grief within a family.