Brennan Wood walked through the doors of Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children & Families in 1987, when her mother, Doris, had died just three days after her 12th birthday. Her journey came full circle when she became Dougy Center’s Executive Director in 2015, after serving in a variety of roles since 2004. Brennan is the author of A Kids Book About Grief and delivered the TEDxPortland Talk “Grief is to Feel, Not Fix.” She serves on the National Advisory Council for The Children’s Collaborative and is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Alliance for Children’s Grief. Her leadership has been recognized with the 2020 Light-a-Fire Award for Extraordinary Executive Director and a 2022 Women of Influence Award. As someone who experienced grief as a child, Brennan knows firsthand the importance of a supportive community. She has dedicated her career to ensuring that other children and families who are grieving have the same opportunities for connection and care that she did. She is committed to building a more grief-informed world, where loss is acknowledged as a natural, normal part of the human experience. Brennan honors her mother’s legacy of making every day a celebration!

Donna L. Schuurman, EdD, FT, is the Senior Director of Advocacy & Education at Dougy Center. Dr. Schuurman was the Executive Director of Dougy Center from 1991 to 2015. Dr. Schuurman is an internationally recognized authority on grief and bereaved children, teens, and families, and the author of Never the Same: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Parent (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), among other publications. Dr. Schuurman has written extensively on topics related to children who are grieving. Her articles and other contributions have been published in scholarly journals and textbooks, and she has been interviewed as an expert on the subject by Redbook, The New York Times, SmartMoney, USA Today, and many other consumer publications. She has worked directly with families and communities impacted by large-scale tragedies and natural disasters including the Oklahoma City bombing (1995), Japan’s Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995), the 9/11 attacks, the Tohoku Earthquake (2011), and the Sandy Hook school shootings (2012).