Learning, Listening, and Showing Up: Yorktown’s Commitment to Truth and Reconciliation
September 26, 2025
Guided by Our North Star: Yorktown Family Services 2024-2025 AGM and Recognition Night
November 6, 2025
November is Grief Awareness Month — a time to recognize that grief affects all of us, especially children. For many children and families, grief can feel like uncharted territory — unpredictable, isolating, and impossible to navigate alone. At Yorktown Family Services, we believe grief should never be faced alone. Our Growing With Grief program creates safe, caring spaces for children, youth, and caregivers to share their stories, honour their loved ones, and begin healing — together.
Through individual therapy, age-specific groups, and family events, Yorktown’s Growing With Grief (GWG) program helps participants process loss, normalize grief, and build resiliency. Using creative, evidence-informed approaches — from expressive arts and narrative therapy to eco-psychosocial activities — GWG invites children, youth, and caregivers to heal together in ways that feel natural and meaningful.
Each year, Growing With Grief hosts community-based Family Events — including our annual Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gatherings — that offer meaningful opportunities for families to honour their loved ones who have died. These events are more than just moments on the calendar; they’re safe, supportive spaces where children, youth, and caregivers can express their grief, share stories, and feel connected to a community that understands.
A recent event invited families to plant flowers in hand-decorated pots, creating personal memory gardens to take home — a hands-on way to honour and remember someone they’ve lost. Thanks to generous donations from Home Depot Caledonia, each planter became a living tribute: a tangible reminder that love endures and that healing, like nature, grows over time.
The events were also profoundly therapeutic. All caregivers surveyed (100%) said they would recommend Family Events to other grieving families, with 97% sharing that the experience helped them feel more connected to their children and to their memories.
One caregiver reflected, “The event made my family feel less alone.” Children, too, found meaning in the creative process. Many said the planting activity helped them express feelings they didn’t know how to put into words:
“It’s okay to be sad.”
“I learned how to make plants grow — and remember my dad.”
“A lot of people are grieving like me.”
Guided by our North Star — the children and families we serve — Growing With Grief continues to illuminate pathways through loss with compassion, creativity, and community.
Community Partnership Award: The Home Depot (Caledonia)
Nominated by the Growing With Grief Team, Preston Steinke, Grief-Focused Family, Child, and Youth Therapist; Chantal Fraizinger, Grief Counsellor; Danielle Courneya, Intake Coordinator & Grief Counsellor; Rachel Claire, Grief and Bereavement Program Facilitator, Yorktown Family Services proudly recognizes Rob Peters and Home Depot Caledonia with a 2024/25 Community Partnership Award for their generosity and heartfelt commitment to Yorktown’s Growing With Grief program.
Through their in-kind donations of flowers, pots, soil, crates, and supplies, Home Depot Caledonia helped make the Growing With Grief Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Family Events possible — transforming what could have been isolating events into an opportunity for sharing and togetherness.
Home Depot’s contributions enabled grieving families to create personal memory gardens, where each plant represented a loved one’s life and the enduring bonds that remain, helping families process grief in creative, therapeutic ways.
Yorktown is deeply grateful for Home Depot’s compassion, partnership, and dedication to our shared mission of helping children, youth, and families find comfort and strength when they need it most.