Embracing Change: Bellis Expands Support and Announces New Partnership
Hello Bellis Community,
I hope you all had an enjoyable summer! At Bellis, we utilized the summer season to explore options for expanding our support services. As we transition into autumn, we shift into a time of renewed focus, routine, and embracing change.
The Bellis team is working to secure partnerships with organizations that serve a similar population to the women we support – namely recovery facilities, mental health centers, and correctional/re-entry facilities. We are thrilled to announce our first official partnership with Project CHILD in Minneapolis starting in 2025. Being able to bring Bellis Stronger Together programming to other organizations continues to elevate our mission and serve more people on a statewide and national level.
Every year there are thousands of parents who have their parental rights legally terminated in the United States. And yet Bellis is the only organization in the country providing grief support for this ambiguous loss for people whose children are parented by others. Bellis receives daily emails, texts, and phone calls from people suffering from this ambiguous loss. To answer this need we have added two additional online drop-in support groups for mothers, and we are excited to announce our first ever online support group for fathers beginning October 1st.
The new group for fathers is in response to individual requests from fathers as well as requests from potential partner organizations. We are eager to take the knowledge, experience, and expertise we have gleaned from over three years of grief support groups for mothers and apply it to the work we can do for fathers.
We continue our work at Minnesota Correctional Facility – Shakopee where we are starting our sixth cohort this week. And our warm line continues to field calls and texts daily from people around the country looking for support and information on our programming.
None of this could be accomplished without our incredible team of facilitators and board members. Please join us in welcoming our four newest team members! Amy Wilkerson and Sheila Bauer join our team of facilitators offering compassionate support to women in the Shakopee cohort and online programming. Elif McCain and Natalie Netzel join the Board of Directors to provide further insight and connections to continue to strengthen and broaden the Bellis mission. We are also delighted to welcome back Jenny Eldredge as a Strategic Advisor to help us navigate high-level partnerships and influence policy and legislation to enhance our work.
One of our greatest strengths at Bellis is our ability to identify and meet the needs of the community with relative immediacy and pivot as needed to further accommodate the ever-changing landscape. We recognize that our service is about meeting people where they are and walking through their journey with them.
Written by Kelly Tronstad, Executive Director of Bellis.
We invite you to invest in Bellis today if, like us and our supporters, this work matters to you.
