New Virtual Grief Support App Offers Peer-Led Compassion To People Grieving

Over 18 million worldwide and 4.5 million in the United States are grieving the traumatic loss of parents, grandparents, spouses, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues, neighbors and others in isolation. The new free mobile app, Virtual Grief Support, offers people suffering access to supportive and non-judgemental virtual communities for and by people grieving similar losses.


The number of people grieving during the pandemic is equal to Australia's population of 23 million and the vast majority find themselves experiencing their unimaginable loss without some of the most time-proven effective bereavement
tools - the physical presence, the embraces, the hugs and welcoming shoulders of their families and friends. The new free mobile app, "Virtual Grief Support", offers them the ability to access, connect, share and listen to a new virtual family of peers experiencing similar uncharted grief journeys in the time of COVID.


In addition to personalized user access to their virtual grief support groups by their loss experience, other app features include,

- General and group specific chat spaces for the virtual community to continue their community-building and support
in between group meetings.

- The "Virtual Grief Support" app also enables users to create their daily Grief Journal entries on the app and save to
their phone. Grief journaling is a tool many in the virtual communities have found very useful in their grieving process, and this app feature makes it simple to access 24/7 from their cell phones.


- To help others grieving by turning their grief into action, the "My Story - Video Uploader" feature of the app enables users to upload their videos on what they have found most helpful in their own grieving process. These videos will be compiled by type of loss experienced and shared with future app users.



- A video collection showcasing the diversity of the many global "Families COVID19 Stories" as compiled by the app's
volunteer team is shared with users to remember those families while at the same time enabling users to find common ground among many of their experiences.



Access to the Grief MOOC ("Massive Open Online Course") - a free online course on grief and our grieving processes - is available anytime anywhere to app users



The new app was conceived, developed and launched by a team of mission-driven virtual volunteers from the non-profit
My Grief Angels. Grieving their own loved ones; the volunteers were Asian, Black, Latinx, LGBTQIA, and White and ranged from their 20s to 60s; some were techies, but most were not, and they all shared one common goal: dedicating their work on this app to the families and friends of COVID19 victims.


About MyGriefAngels

My Grief Angels Inc, a Texas-based 501 (c) (3) public charity, is an Online Grief Support Community of People world-wide coping with loss and helping each other by leveraging new technologies to find and share the latest resources, education, information and personal grief journeys/ experiences. My Grief Angels is a 2021 Platinum level non-profit with Guidestar, and a 2020 Great Non-Profit organization. In 2014, My Grief Angels launched the first proximity-based award-winning mobile app to help people dealing with loss create their own local grief support network, but as new video-based technologies have risen in accessibility and because of the unique bereavement needs of people grieving during the pandemic - the new app, "Virtual Grief Support", was developed.