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Connecting the Gap

Connecting the Gap is a 501c3 organization that empowers youth and young adults who are grieving the loss of a parent or guardian by creating intentional connections to enable a healthy and optimistic future. The uniqueness of our organization is that we help these children and young adults cope with their grief during the most difficult time of their lives. We believe by tackling grief head-on with an individualized holistic approach, children and their families can maintain normal activities at home, school, and in their local community.

Our Activity

Connecting the Gap focuses on a whole life approach through our five pillars: Mentorship, Education, Health and Wellness, Economic Empowerment, and Counseling. Each child and young adult we serve goes through an intake process. During this process we create a plan to best serve them and their caregiver. With the help of community partners, we surround our participants with a network of support and resources to successfully sustain them while in school and as they transition into life post graduation.

The CTG Whole Life Approach: Our Five Pillars

Advising

We connect families with a CTG Advisor who helps identify community mentoring programs while also finding resources to help aid each child and caregiver through grief. CTG Advisors help families meet their financial, educational, social, and emotional needs.This may also include connecting them with a counselor, tutor, or assisting with extracurricular activities.

Education

We assist our youth with educational resources by collaborating with community partners to help students succeed in school while grieving. Our goal is to ensure that each student graduates high school, and they are prepared to transition into a college, trade school, military, or land a job.

Health and Wellness

Through Health and Wellness we aim to teach the children in our program a holistic approach to grieving by tapping into their physical, mental, social, emotional, environmental, and spiritual well-being. This assists our youth in enhancing their quality of life and overall well-being or happiness.

Economic Empowerment

Economic Empowerment teaches our parents or caregivers, who are left grieving without a community, to make the right decisions around their finances, health, education, and housing. Some parents are left homeless. Some may get behind on their rent or mortgage. Some may just need a bigger space because they are now the new caregiver to their niece, nephew, or grandchild. We aim to assist them in a new management style to help foster career and financial goals while living a “new” or different life than before.

Counseling

Counseling is the most important part of our program. Experiencing the loss of a parent can be very confusing for a child. Children of all ages may feel angry, confused, frustrated, hopeless, lonely, and deeply saddened by the loss of a parent/guardian. We want our kids to tackle grief upfront. This will aid them in developing healthy ways to deal with loss. At the same time, we encourage the surviving parent or caregiver to receive therapy allowing for generational healing.

CTG 6 Core Values

Community

community is our focus point. In order for our organization to make impact, we need the community. We believe in the idea that the community is what builds a loving and successful child.

Compassion

We understand that it is important to take the time to understand our families especially in their time of need. We strive on having sympathy and empathy not only for our families but for our employees, volunteers and partners.

Integrity

It is very important for us to build and maintain trust for our families and our organization.

Sustainability

Drive about our performance and bring about positive results while developing meaningful solutions with fewer resources

Transparency

It is important and critical for our organization to have open and honest communication.

Work-Life Balance

We want to encourage an effective work and life balance where we encourage family focus, flexibility, happiness, and personal and professional growth.