LANSING, Mich. (WILX) -This week, our Make An Impact campaign shines a spotlight on Ele’s Place, a healing center for children who have lost a loved one. Ele’s Place was founded by a mom who couldn’t find a mental health center for her own children to grieve the loss of a sibling.
Betsy Stover is Ele’s mom.
“Our Ele was Helen Louise Snow-Stover, and when she was born, we took the H and the N off, and just always called her Ele,” Stover says.
Stover says when Ele came into the world on May 9, 1988, she had a long list of medical challenges, and in the fall of that year was in and out of Lansing’s Sparrow hospital.
Then, in January of 1989, Ele would go into Sparrow Hospital and would never go home again.
Ele died on April 24, 1989… three weeks shy of her first birthday.
Ele’s surviving siblings were seven, five and three years old at the time.
“They didn’t really have the language to understand what death was, and that they were never going to see their sister again, and that our family was never going to be the same again,” Stover recalls.
Pregnant at the time with her fifth child, Betsy Stover, along with her husband Woody, put a priority on dealing with their surviving children’s grief.
“Helping the kids was the first thing we had to do and was going to be the hardest thing we had to do, because there really wasn’t a model.
Stover says in the late 80s, there were programs addressing adult grief issues, but few for kids.
So she and a group of friends took a class at Lansing Community College titled “Children and Grief.”
As a class project, they came up with a business plan to start a healing center for grieving children. By the fall of 1991, that healing center was up and running at a local church.
The founding members decided to call it Ele’s Place, but Betsy Stover wanted the name to signify more than just her daughter’s memory.
“I sat in my kitchen and got the dictionary, and looked at the e-words, and there was ‘embracing,” and there was ‘loss,” and there was ‘effectively,” Stover says. And the mission of Ele’s Place was born… to help children embrace loss effectively.
For more than three decades, Ele’s Place has offered peer-to-peer bereavement support groups for children ages 3 to 18, to heal after the death of a loved one… To date, more than 30,000 individuals have been helped by Ele’s Place.
Betsy Stover says Ele’s Place is a totally free mental health insurance policy for families.
There’s no cost, and no time limit for children to work through their grief.
35 years ago, Betsy Stover turned her personal worry into a vision that no child or teen in Michigan should ever grieve alone.
“My kids needed help, and there wasn’t anything, so I in my wildest dreams could never expect 35 years later for Ele’s Place to have this impact.
Besides the flagship location in Lansing, Ele’s Place also has healing centers in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Betsy Stover’s four adult children are all involved in helping with the Ele’s Place mission.
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