Shuttered South Bay mental health program charts new course

When a longstanding program offering grief counseling and mental health support services in the South Bay lost funding and had to shut down in December, two women who served the organization for years began making their own plans.

“We wanted to figure out a way to continue doing the work,” Janet Childs, who co-founded the program known as the Centre for Living with Dying in 1976, told San José Spotlight.

Childs has teamed up with her longtime collaborator, Sue Cronin, who formerly worked as a program director for the center, to launch Footsteps Forward, a nonprofit organization. The goal is to fill the considerable gap left behind by the closure of the Centre for Living with Dying, which helped roughly 1.5 million people navigate grief and trauma over its 50-year run, according to Childs.

Cronin, who will lead Footsteps Forward, said they plan to launch in three to four months. Once the nonprofit is up and running, it will offer grief counseling, crisis response services and various training programs intended for first responders and the general public, Cronin said.

“Whether someone just experienced horrific loss and they’re in survival mode, or if they’re on their healing journey and they’re ready to thrive and take classes, we will stand beside them,” Cronin told San José Spotlight.

For the past 20 years, the Centre for Living with Dying was operated as a program overseen by San Jose service nonprofit the Bill Wilson Center. The organization announced the closure of the Centre for Living with Dying in a Nov. 8 letter, which indicated the decision came in response to the loss of a “major grant” covering “grief services operations.”

A Bill Wilson Center representative confirmed the Centre for Living with Dying closed in December, but declined to comment further.

When Childs co-founded the Centre for Living with Dying in Santa Clara in the 1970s, the original vision was relatively modest: help people who had suffered a traumatic loss with one-on-one grief counseling support. But as the full scope of the community’s needs came into focus, the organization expanded its programming to include workshops and specialized support groups.

The center’s counselors also began to respond in person to traumatic incidents, providing what Cronin terms “emergency grief counseling” and “psychological first aid.”

Cronin herself has offered counseling in the wake of hundreds of such incidents, including fatal car accidents, suicides, fires and mass shootings. She was on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting and the 2021 VTA rail yard shooting, and went on to provide ongoing counseling support to survivors for years thereafter.

Footsteps Forward will start small, employing just three workers, including Cronin, Childs and a clinical supervisor, while relying on a network of volunteers. But Cronin said she hopes to one day replicate the group’s work outside of the South Bay.

“We often get calls from people outside of Santa Clara County, even in other states, requesting our services,” Cronin said.

The gears are already in motion for Footstep Forward’s eventual launch. Cronin said the group has entered contract talks to provide services to several South Bay first responder and law enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, Cronin and Childs plan to launch a newsletter that will include updates on their progress.

The pair said mental health education will remain central to their work. To that end, the nonprofit’s educational offerings will include workshops teaching practical skills on grief and stress management. Such know-how helps not only those who attend these workshops, Childs said, but also the community at large.

“It’s really about giving them the tools to be able to empower them to support each other, and then also to become teachers to their greater community,” she said. “I call it the infinity circle of giving and receiving. Where the people who have been supported become the supporters.”

That circle of giving has already found its way to countless people in the South Bay, including Gilroy resident Karen Jenkins, who connected with the center during a moment of profound loss for her family. On Jan. 6 2021, her 22-year-old son died by suicide after a years-long struggle with mental health challenges, she said. Shortly thereafter, she reached out to the Centre for Living with Dying.

“They responded immediately, thank God,” Jenkins told San José Spotlight. “They sat in my backyard with me and my husband and my daughter.”

Jenkins later went on to continue the circle of giving herself, speaking at community events and offering peer support to others who have suffered similar traumatic losses. Jenkins said she is eager to become one of Footsteps Forward’s first volunteers when it launches.

“It would be a big loss if we weren’t able to have them still in our community,” Jenkins said. “It saves lives. I’m not kidding you.”

Contact Keith Menconi at [email protected] or @KeithMenconi on X.