Military Family Project

What is the Military Project?

The Cruse Military Family Project is a specialist fund. We use it to help train veterans in bereavement care, following the death of fellow veterans.

This project was first funded by the Libour Fund, administered by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund. The funding ended in September 2020. 

We have been given further funding from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund to continue this project until July 2023. 

What we do

We support bereaved veterans by offering bereavement training. This includes learning coping skills for grief and shock, sharing appropriate advice and helping build confidence. The aim is to help veterans understand bereavement, and how it may impact those left behind.

We want to help them feel confident to support other bereaved veterans, as well as the families of those who have died in service. After all, who is better to support a veteran than another veteran? 

We also offer immediate support to veterans and their families.

During the pandemic we’ve also been offering training to Veteran support agencies such as Royal British Legion, MOD Veterans welfare and many more. Since November 2020 we have delivered 37 sessions with 525 attendees, with more in the pipeline.

How we do it

• We will help any veteran who reaches out to us.
• The training is currently done over Zoom.
• We tailor the training to what the veteran already knows about bereavement. For those who already have knowledge and experience, we want to build on what they know and enhance their grief support toolkit.
• For those who are new to bereavement, we will help build their confidence. We will focus on how to help and communicate with bereaved people.

Get involved

If you’d like us to support you with this training, please contact our project manager Gary Martin at [email protected]

Immediate help following a bereavement

Talking about how you’re feeling can really help. We offer a range of services for people who are grieving. Find out the ways we can support you. 

Project evaluation 

The Military Project has been evaluated to assess how effective the training had been. This evaluation was carried out by Sheffield University, using Government approved methods.