Building a Grief Sensitive Community - with Dr. Kim Mead-Walters

Summary

In this episode of Growth from Grief, Dr. Kim Mead-Walters, the Executive Director of Sharing Kindness, shares her personal journey following the loss of her son to suicide and how it led to the creation of Sharing Kindness, an organization focused on suicide awareness and grief support. The conversation explores the importance of community support, the need for grief-sensitive services, and the various programs offered to individuals of all ages. Kim discusses the Hope Squad initiative, which empowers students to support their peers in mental health crises, and highlights the unique challenges faced by the Cape Cod community regarding grief and loss. The episode concludes with a vision for the future of Sharing Kindness and an invitation for community involvement.

Takeaways

• Kim's personal story highlights the need for suicide awareness.
• Sharing Kindness was born from a community need for support.
• The organization offers grief support across all age groups.
• Hope Squad empowers students to help peers in crisis.
• Cape Cod has a higher rate of bereaved children than the national average.
• Community partnerships enhance the effectiveness of grief support.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen (00:02.626)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Growth from Grief. And I'm here with Kim Mead-Walters, who's the Executive Director of Sharing Kindness. And you heard a little bit of her intro at the beginning of this recording. But Kim, welcome. I'm so glad to be talking with you.

Thank you, Sue. so pleased to be here. Thank you for the invitation, especially in Suicide Awareness Month. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to start, Kim, I mean, my intro was very brief. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your story and sort of the beginnings of sharing kindness.

Kim Mead-Walters:

I'm happy to do that. Thank you. So the back story for me is that I'm a physician, a family physician, and I really thought that would be my only professional career. But 25 years into that career in 2016, the youngest of our four children died from suicide. Jeremy was a high school junior.

I have made a promise to myself that anytime I speak about him publicly and how he died, I also want to mention how he lived, which was passionately as a dog lover. His favorite place was walking in the woods, just a really terrific kid. I'm very lucky to be his mom. And when Jeremy died, I recognized and my family recognized our experience was hat there were big gaps in service here on the Cape around suicide awareness and around grief support.

Kim Mead-Walters (01:48.034)

And I learned that that wasn't true everywhere, that there were actually evidence-based programs and best practice programs around suicide awareness and suicide prevention and around grief support. They just weren't available here.

And so, in 2017, year after just died, we held the first, suicide awareness walk. And it was for me, a life-changing event. we thought that we would get maybe 50 or 75 people, our friends, Jeremy's friends, and nearly 400 people came. If most of those folks, we did not know. They came to honor their person. They came to talk about their person, to be heard and seen. And I just felt a conviction in my heart that day that one suicide awareness walk per year, one day to have these critical, important conversations and provide support to each other, that was not going to be enough. And so that's actually really the day that Sharing Kindness was born. It was the experience that I had and my family had and then that we had as community at the first walk that led us to become 501c3 in 2018.

Susan Andersen:

Yeah, yeah. And of course, you and I, as I mentioned in my intro, we've known each other since a little bit before that.

Kim Mead-Walters (03:38.266)

But before that, because as bereaved moms, we were connecting and providing peer support on our own. both of us recognizing the need for these services that we're both.

Susan Andersen:

Right, right, exactly, exactly. so just so everybody knows, so I was involved when I lived on the Cape, which I don't anymore, but I was involved in offering some yoga and just volunteering with the organization. I was on the advisory board. And one of the things that if you've never been on a board, advisory board or board of directors, in an organization that's just starting, one of the things that's critical is putting together a mission statement. So it's the mission statement. It's what is this organization all about? What is it going to do? How is it going to serve the community? And then all the websites and all those things come after that.

 And one of the things that I remember about the earlier days, the early days of the organization was start the conversation, start the conversation. That was a big part of the mission of the organization because as you mentioned, Kim, there was no services. Nobody was really talking about anything. was sort of like peer to peer, know, mom to mom or dad to dad or what have you.

And of course, that's still part of the organization. That's a really critical part of the organization. But over the years, that mission statement has expanded and contracted. The mission statement is shorter, but the mission is actually a little larger.

Kim Mead-Walters (05:43.486)

Very well said. I totally agree. And yes, in the beginning and end still, we wanted to start the conversation. It felt like there was a lot of silence around grief and loss and particularly in stig - excuse me, particularly stigmatized deaths, such as suicide or overdose. And we wanted to start those conversations and normalize.

So still an important message. Thank you for picking up on that. The board of directors met this past year and they did, we were able to to make a more concise mission statement, which is building a suicide,wWhich is building a grief sensitive and suicide aware Cape and Islands community.

And they were able to do that because as we've expanded our offerings, we've also become much more comfortable, much more engaged, much what we do is easier to see. And that makes it easier to explain.

Susan Andersen:

Right, right. And the other thing I think that's important for our listeners, especially listeners that are in Massachusetts and specifically those that are on Cape and the Islands, is that this organization is part of that mission being grief, not grief aware... sensitive. Grief sensitive, thank you. Grief sensitive opens up to other types of grief. So the support that this organization offers now, Sharing Kindness offers now, goes beyond just suicide loss and specifically touches from the youngest to the oldest, I would say, with programs that are appropriate for those groups based on your learning

Susan Andersen (08:01.442)
and your staff's learning about what are the best programs for different age groups. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Kim Mead-Walters:

Yeah, I'd love to. And you are correct. We are committed to providing services across the lifespan. So our youngest grief group participants are six, age six. And our oldest folks are in their ninth and 10th decades of life in some of our older adult groups, because grief impacts us all.

We can all benefit from support for our children and their families, our clinicians, and I should actually back up and add each of our groups, whether they're in person, which is true of most of our groups, or virtual, we have a handful or school based, which is a really rapidly growing area for us to offer groups. They're all clinician led, which is to say there's a licensed LICSW, a social worker or a licensed mental health counselor leading each group for safety and for the ability to provide psycho-education. And we know that this is critically important. 

For instance, for children with unaddressed grief, they are at higher risk of early mortality and actually two and a half times higher risk of suicide. They're less likely to graduate from high school. They're more likely to develop a substance abuse disorder within five years of the death of their parent. And they're more likely to enter the juvenile justice system. And that's from any cause of death. So we feel really, really strongly about the grief groups that we're doing in the community and the school based programs, which are now in six school districts across the Cape

Kim Mead-Walters (10:04.654)
to support the children and families. And yes, when some of our other community partners heard that we were having clinician-led grief groups, one of the first groups to approach us was actually the maternal child health group out of the VNA. And they said, we are sending folks with pregnancy loss or stillbirth or perinatal loss off-cape. There's no services here. Can we partner with you? And so we have a thriving perinatal loss group. 

We have groups for young adults, 18 to 25, who, and we at Sharing Kindness, whenever your loss occurred is when it occurred, there's no timeframes for becoming one of our participants. we've had people have lost, for instance, as a very young child and join as a teenager or have loss as a young adult and join as an older adult because these services weren't available when they had experienced the loss 20 or 25 years ago. Yes, our goal at this point is we do have a handful of suicide specific programs, but the majority of our programs are any type of death loss.

Susan Andersen:

Right, which is so incredibly important because, I mean, you and I are around the same age. And so you remember probably when you were growing up and nobody would talk about, know, who is that person? You'd see a picture and be like, you know, oh, that's whoever it was. That's so-and-so. Oh, well, how come I never, as an adult, you're asking this question. How come I never heard of her? Oh, we don't talk about what happened to her. So there was a lot of, you know, we don't talk about it.

Kim Mead-Walters (12:04.468)
I can remember being at a family party. And so this is probably the late 60s, maybe early 70s. And I can hear I can remember hearing one of my older relatives say something about the big C. They didn't even talk about cancer openly. And so of course, no, no one was talking about that family member who died of a stigmatized death. Right. And the same way that we've normalized cancer, I really hope that we can be normalizing brain health and not put suicide loss under that.

Susan Andersen:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's so incredibly important. And that's why I do what I do, because I think that just talking about it, this woman that I had, Sylvia Moore Myers, that I interviewed for the podcast last previous episode, she had this saying that was, people with wounds are looking for people with scars. And so the people, somebody that's suffered some sort of loss is looking for that person that has had a loss and is willing to talk about it and share.

Kim Mead-Walters:

I couldn't agree more. I haven't heard it said that way, but it's, I believe that's so true because I think what we're looking for, I know what I was looking for right after my son's death was to know that I could survive it. Cause it didn't, it didn't feel, I wasn't sure I could. And to meet somebody who has survived the death of their child. And in my case, specifically from suicide, it was the installation of hope like, she survived.

Susan Andersen (13:45.9)
Yeah.

Kim Mead-Walters:

So maybe I can survive. But that was my person with scars, right? So I love that saying.

Susan Andersen (13:58.082)

Yeah, and you mentioned hope so I want to just draw attention to those that are not familiar with the Hope Squad so can you talk a little bit about Hope Squad and and how that how that all started because that didn't the Hope Squad itself that entity didn't start on the Cape right is that from other.

Kim Mead-Walters:

It did not. So Hope Squad is just over 20 years old, actually began in Utah. And it began with a school that there that had a number of youth suicides and just said, no, need that. There has to be something better. And so they have developed in conjunction with three universities. So that's very data rich. And that has let Hope Squad become an evidence based best practice program from SAMHSA on their suicide prevention resource center site. 

We were working actually with Falmouth High School on youth mental health. This is just coming out of the pandemic. And we showed a documentary at the high school. And fortunately for us, it was very well attended and the superintendent was there and the director of student services and the high school principal along with students and their parents. And part of this documentary talked about Hope Squad. And when the documentary finished, literally people sort of looked at it. Why, why don't we do that? And so Sharing Kindness approached Hope Squad and we offered with our funding from the Suicide Awareness Walk to to provide to provide those funds so that there was no cost to the school. And Falmouth High School became the very first Hope Squad in the state of Massachusetts.

I am so pleased to share it with you that as of this month, September, 2025, Sharing Kindness supports Hope Squads in 14 schools. Wow. I know across Cape Cod and now Martha's Vineyard High School was just changed. So we're on one of the islands and it is remarkable because it is peer to peer suicide prevention. The students for the squad are nominated by their peers. So right in the beginning, there's buy-in from the students at school. 

Kim Mead-Walters (16:16.952)

These young people are chosen because they're identified or nominated because they're good listeners, because they have empathy, because they're trustworthy. All the qualities any of us would look for. They have to be parent approval or permission. And they become, there's a very robust curriculum. They become the bridge to support. So they are taught to do intentional outreach to their peers who might be struggling and be the connection. And it's so critical because AFSP, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, says that about half the time with our youth, they don't disclose suicidal ideation. But the other 50 % of the time when they do, seven times out of 10, it's to appear. 

So we need to have those peers well informed so that they know what to do with that information. And they are overseen. We start each Hope Squad by training advisors at the school. So it's student-driven, advisor overseen, peer-to-peer suicide prevention, and it's brilliant. All of the other pieces that happen with a Hope Squad, there's less stigmatizing language. So if you're a student at that school, and maybe you identify as LGBTQ, it's a safer school for you because there's less stigmatizing language. There's increased help seeking behavior. There's less bullying. It just, it makes, changes the fabric, the culture of the school in a beautiful and positive way. 

And which is as schools start talking in the beginning, we really had to talk to schools. They, they obviously it was their decision, but, but we really talked a lot about why we thought they should do this. Now we're getting the calls and emails saying, we just talked to this school. Can we do what they're doing? And so it's become much easier on our end to sign schools up.

Susan Andersen  (18:24.206)

Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. And I imagine you mentioned SAMHSA. So I just wanted people to know that there's different funding organizations. Some of them are federal government funded. Some of them are state government funded. I mean, funding groups within the state or from the state or from the federal government. And then funding that's done through just fundraising as you do or or donations from people. 

So, you know, in this economy, as we know, it's it's sometimes we don't know what's going on with this federal funding or with the with the state funding, because a lot of times state gets the money from the federal government. And I know that one, you mentioned evidence base. So I know that that's in your favor in terms of getting funding. But also just to let listeners know that

Susan Andersen (19:22.018)

you know, these this organization, like a lot of organizations, they try to get this money from, you know, government funds, but it's also the donations that make some of these things happen, like, you know, like Hope Squad. So just keep that in the back of your mind, people. As we are in Suicide Awareness Month and Suicide Awareness Day when when this is being but this podcast is going live. 

Kim Mead-Walters:

Right, right. I thank you for saying that. And if this sort of work or story resonates with your listeners, you can look at Hope Squad online. Please feel free to reach out to us. Because as Sue mentioned, we do have a couple of folks who have elected to help support us, support Hope Squads in certain towns that are important to them. And so that's a thank you for mentioning that.

Susan Andersen:

Yeah, you're welcome. So I wanted to kind of broaden out a little bit in terms of I know that the organization has worked, this Sharing Kindness organization has worked with other organizations across the country, especially those that have models for children, supporting children in grief. And I know that you and your team have been working hard on that to develop some programs from that, and have the training to sort of train the trainer, the people that are leading these groups. So can we talk a little bit about what's different about Cape Cod specifically in terms of why this need is so great, even comparing it to like just the rest of Massachusetts or what you know from other states?

Kim Mead-Walters:

Yeah, absolutely. So Cape Cod is different in many ways. Quite simply, we have an elevated suicide rate across the lifespan, youth on up. And currently, that's about one and a half times higher risk once you cross the bridge to the Cape. We have a very high number of bereaved children.

Kim Mead-Walters  (21:44.33)

So one of the groups that we belong to nationally is the National Alliance for Children's Grief, NACG. And we worked with the JAG, J-A-G Institute under affiliated with NACG to look at childhood bereavement on CAPE. And to put this in perspective, historically, the highest rate of childhood bereavement has been in West Virginia.

And as a physician, that doesn't surprise me because I know that West Virginia is the home of many pill mills. And so the opioid crisis hit there early and hard. And in West Virginia, one in every eight children is bereaved of a parent by the age of 18, parent or sibling, generally parent by the age of 18. In Barnstable County, it's one in nine. Wow. 

Susan Andersen:

Wow.

Kim Mead-Walters:

And the reason the Jag Institute, they use CDC data, they dug into that. And our rate of accidental deaths in the parent age group for our young children is more than twice the national average and substance use related deaths, including overdose are per the CDC, they fall into that accidental death category. And so that is in large part there are other contributing factors. 

But as we said before, so we have 4,000 bereaved children across the Cape. Those children are at increased risk, as we mentioned before, for substance use disorder and not graduating from high school and for suicide. And we feel so strongly that to have a healthy, resilient, Cape and Islands shared community

Kim Mead-Walters (23:41.3)
we need to be working with other community partners, including schools, to address and help support these bereaved children.

Susan Andersen:

Wow, yeah, that's incredible.

Kim Mead-Walters:

One in nine, For listeners that may want to know the state average is one in 13. So when the Barnstable County, we're really pulling down the average. Yeah, and that is in large part the impact of the opioid epidemic.

Susan Andersen:

Wow. Yep, that's yeah, it's like, I don't even know what to say.

Kim Mead-Walters:

That's that. So you know what? I will share a story with you. When we had these numbers done, the fellow at the Jag Institute that was doing the work we had contracted for knows the Cape. He's in Colorado. That's where the Jag Institute is. And he said, I love the Cape. My in-laws live on the Cape. And when he came back to us, he said, I'm having trouble. I'm looking at these numbers, which I know to be true. It's good, solid data.

Kim Mead-Walters: (24:45.25)

And I'm thinking about the Cape that I know that baseball games, lobster rolls, the beaches. And that I think is a large part of the disconnect that many people experience here on the Cape. They just don't see the struggle that so many people have, but it's here. You're not going to see it at the information, the visitor's information booth, but it's...

Susan Andersen:

Right, right. And I'm sure that the cost of housing enters into that too, because am I correct? Did I recently read that the median price of the home on the Cape in Barnstable County was %800,000? 

Kim Mead-Walters: 

It's likely, I haven't, I don't recall seeing the number, but I will say that you are hitting the nail on the head because there are so many social determinants of health, and those roll into risk factors. And so that we know that affordable or accessible housing, sustainable housing is a significant risk. There was a study that was done. It was a Midwestern state and they raised the basic rate by a dollar an hour. And there was a significant decrease in the number of suicides, because just going up $1 per hour in what you can achieve or via work instilled some hope -that, now I can make it. 

And so, you know, I think that those yes, mental health and significant behavioral health diagnoses are a part and should be a concern and certainly elevate risk for things like suicide and substance use. But there are so many factors that play in here. And those are..

Kim Mead-Walters  (26:55.758)
What makes the Cape different? All of that. Yeah, seasonal economy, high cost of living. And so on. Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Andersen:

Just change the subject for a second here. So tell me a little bit about what you have up and coming. So now you've got this change in mission statement, the website's already done, and what's your vision for the organization in the next couple of years?

Kim Mead-Walters:

Great question. So we are expanding our offerings. We're going to continue with the clinician-led grief groups. They're wonderful. But going back to our roots and to how at Sharing Kindness, how we met you, we know that complementary healing is significant, that sometimes you can't say it, but you could perhaps drum it or paint it. We know that grief can get stuck and you need to move and to change your breathing. And so we are expanding our complimentary healing. So that's happening as we speak. And we are moving towards developing a permanent home. 

We're in our first rental home at the moment, but we are at the very early stages of a capital campaign for what we call the Healing House. And this will be a permanent home for us to do the programming and organizing for sharing kindness so that we can better serve the Cape and Islands.

Susan Andersen: (28:48.27)

That's fantastic. That's great. Well, Kim, is there anything else that you wanted to let our listeners know?

Kim Mead-Walters (28:58.998)
Thank you.  I would just like to say that we welcome volunteers. Some of those volunteers go on to become trained and help with running our programs. Some are just terrific volunteers and help us out with community events and that sort of thing. If anybody has questions or wants to know more, they can reach out to me, Kim at sharingkindness.org or via the website, www.sharingkindness.org.

Susan Andersen:

Great, okay. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. And this was such an informative conversation. I think not just for people that live on Cape Cod, but think about your own community. wherever you are in this world and you're listening, what do you have available to you in your community? Or do you have questions about how to start something? Kim would be a great person to talk to.

So thanks everyone and thank you so much, Kim. I really appreciate your time.

Kim Mead-Walters:

Thank you.

Susan Andersen (30:07.534)
Bye now.