A Conversation With ... Mark Miller

This year marks 25 years of Lost & Found Grief Center. Can you quantify the impact of the nonprofit, how many people have been served, and how do you think the community has talked about grief differently since the founding?
Lost & Found was founded in 2000 by local attorney Shawn Askinosie and the head of school counseling for (Springfield Public Schools), Dr. Karen Scott. Shawn lost his father when he was young, a teenager, and Dr. Scott saw the impact that losing a spouse, losing a sibling had on children in her role with SPS. So they thought, couldn’t we start some kind of grief counseling program? The first groups had fewer than 20 people, that’s parents and children, on the third floor of Shawn’s law offices. By 2005, they had their own house called the Connor House, which is where Pour Life is now. In 2015, we moved to our current facility here on Glenstone. Dr. Scott, who is a board member and we call her the executive director emeritus, estimates that we have served more than 25,000 people either through groups, individual therapy, but even through education. What I think we get then is a grief-informed community. Ben Franklin said the only things you can count on in life are death and taxes, but the third thing that he forgot to mention is grief. There’s nothing you can say or do that will replace the person that someone has lost, but there are things you can do to try to relieve some of their pain and their grief.

Looking at your space now, I imagine the nonprofit has expanded quite a bit since the beginnings in a law office. Who do you serve and through what services?
We help people as young as 4 and there’s no limit to the age of people that we help. If somebody suffers a loss, they may call in or come in and they say, “I want to start grief therapy.” One of our counselors, our trained grief coordinators, will call them back and do an intake. They want to hear what happened, who they lost, family dynamics. If it’s a family, they’ll come in for an orientation and then they’ll get scheduled to start a group. We follow, for most of our groups, a semester program. The groups typically meet twice a month for an hour and a half. They will do different group projects that are all designed to help people process their grief. I can describe one of those to you, it’s a plate breaking ceremony. One thing that comes with grief a lot is guilt, things you’d wish you’d done, things you’d wish you’d said. They’ll write those things on a plate and then they will take those outside, double bag them, and then they wear goggles, gloves, and with rubber mallets, smash the plates. It is a symbolic message to the people you have broken those emotions. But a lot of it is just talk. And for the children, there is even some play. We use a forward moving model. So you never move on, but you can move forward with a life that is thriving. We provide therapeutic grief support services at no cost to the families we serve. We do have individual therapy, and that is a fee-based program. Last complete fiscal year, we had 880 people enrolled in our groups, and 124 people come in for individual counseling. Feb. 3 will be my 8-month anniversary, and one thing I’ve noticed is how many people have had a loss. There are so many people on staff like Melanie [Blair], my assistant executive director, she lost her little boy, Charlie, from complications from bacterial meningitis. We have people on staff who lost a parent when they were relatively young, another person lost a parent and a fiancé. There are people on our board who lost parents when they were young. If I hadn’t lost my son, Luke, I never would’ve considered applying for the position of executive director. So many people are just driven by the mission and have experienced that loss.

How are you funded?
Aside from the not even 1% of what we get from fees for individual counseling, it’s all grants and donations. Our Evening of Hope event, that is our biggest fundraiser. We made a little more than $400,000 [this year], and that’s about a third of our budget, which is fantastic. But for almost every small, not-for-profit, it is the challenge that we want to offer a no-cost service to the families that we serve, because that makes it so accessible to everybody.

With that point of view of losing your son and experiencing this place from both sides, as a client and not as executive director, how would you characterize what Lost & Found meant to you in your grief journey?
My wife and I came to individual counseling together. At the time we just weren’t ready for a group setting. Dr. Scott was our therapist. What I realized, and I think what most people realize, is I’m not alone. There are a lot of people who know how I feel because they’ve suffered something similar. It gave me hope for the future that there would be a time when I wouldn’t just have despair. With that forward moving model that we employ, it doesn’t mean you’re never going to be sad again. don’t just grieve the fact that my son died, but also the life that he was going to have and the life that my wife and my son and I would’ve had with Luke. So, then you find a way to honor them. I found my son, he had a seizure in his sleep and died, and I found him the next morning, and obviously that was a traumatic experience. Dr. Scott had me think about, OK, associate that with a good memory with Luke. It was just a memory of when he was little and we were playing, we had G.I. Joes and action figures all over the house, and he just at one point just exclaimed, “Daddy, this is so much fun!” And now every time I think about that traumatic experience, I do also equate that wonderful experience with him.

This is a local, independent grief center. Has the organization considered expanding into other regions?
We’ve thought about that in the past. I think what it comes down to is capacity and funding. One of my goals as the executive director is to get a sustainable fund, essentially an endowment. Instead of fundraising every year for our operation, and we are so thankful to our donors that it happens every year, but to have a long-term endowment. I came out of higher ed, you see these colleges that have just billions of dollars in the bank, and I don’t want billions, but just enough to where most of our operational budget is there every year. I think once we would have that kind of sustainable funding, then we could look at expanding. The need is there, and people do travel to us from areas of the Ozarks.

What size of an endowment would you need to have that sustained funding?
Our budget’s just over $1 million a year. If you figured about a 5% draw, for an endowment, it’d be about $25 million. That’s not even thinking about inflation. It’s funny, I mentioned that to somebody and they said, “I don’t think any not-for-profit in town has a $25 million endowment.” And I said, “Well, let’s go.” People will give to need, but more than anything, they want to give to excellence. What we are doing here at Lost & Found is excellent, and the biggest thing is that it’s accessible to everyone.