Genevieve Liu lost her father at 13. Now, she and a team of young entrepreneurs are building an online community to help teens deal with the loss of a parent.
According to a 2010 survey funded by the New York Life Foundation, one in nine Americans loses a parent before turning 20 years old. But since the loss of a parent is a painful subject to talk about, teens especially can end up suffering on their own.
“I felt so alone,” said Liu (pictured far right), whose father died while attempting to save two boys from drowning in Lake Michigan.
Despite having a supportive community of friends and family around her, Liu’s loss was accompanied by a sense that no one else could understand what she was going through. In hopes of giving her an outlet for that grief, Liu’s mother put her in touch with a former classmate who had also lost a parent.
“Meeting her was what was going to restore my courage, and make me open up about all my thoughts and questions that I had had since my father died,” said Liu. “After talking to her, I felt like I wasn’t alone, and I felt like I was more than my grief.”
Having searched extensively online for a place to meet fellow grievers, Liu had trouble finding the kind of community she was looking for.
So she decided to start her own.
In 2014, she founded SLAP’D with Benny Friedman, then a fellow student at the University of Chicago Lab School.
Short for “Surviving Life After a Parent Dies,” SLAP’D combines an online discussion forum and a Pinterest-style board for memorializing parents with resources from bereavement centers and hospital-based grief counseling programs across the country. This summer, her team is launching an Indiegogo campaign to raise funding to redesign the site.
Friedman said SLAP’D has already secured enough funding for a basic rebuild, but additional funding will let the team expand the scope of the redesign.
“To really get all the functionality that we want out of it, we need a little bit more money,” said Friedman. “But we don’t just want the funds…. Having it be a crowdfunding push really lets people who are close to the mission get more involved in it.”
Beyond raising awareness about SLAP’D, Friedman and Liu also hope the Indiegogo campaign will educate people about the broader issue of childhood grief and parent loss at a young age.
The company was a finalist in the University of Chicago’s Social New Venture Challenge in 2015 — a first for a team led by high school students. This summer, the company is taking part in the university’s summer accelerator program.
Having been open for less than a week and only circulated within a close circle of supporters, SLAP’D’s Indiegogo campaign had already raised over $13,000 by Wednesday. The company has also raised an additional $10,000 in institutional grants from a foundation and a charitable trust.
With the redesign, Liu hopes the site will be better able to connect teens with resources and, most importantly, other grieving teens.
“I really do believe that the greatest resource we have is one another,” said Liu.
Image via SLAP'D.
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