for Anyone ~ of Any Age ~ at Any Time ~ under Any Roof
Home Hospice Association's Program Menu strengthen the community based systems of support that surround individuals and families facing dying, death, caregiving, and grief. By building knowledge, confidence, and compassionate capacity within communities, these programs help ensure support is available where people already live, work, learn, worship, and gather, advancing HHA's vision of a Canada where no one faces the end of life alone. Each HHA Living and Dying Well Pathway represents how these programs are customized for each population we serve.
Another Day
Because grief doesn’t start when the casseroles stop coming
Why This Matters
Loss does not begin at death or end with bereavement. Many individuals experience the emotional, social, and practical impacts of loss long before a death occurs and long afterward. While grief is a universal human experience, many people navigate it in isolation without meaningful opportunities for connection and understanding.
Each year, up to 1,000,000 people in Canada are affected by dying, death, caregiving, and grief. Yet support is often limited to periods of immediate crisis. When experiences of loss go unacknowledged, individuals may experience isolation, reduced well being, and a diminished sense of connection to their communities.
How Another Day Responds
Another Day responds by creating opportunities for connection, reflection, compassionate companionship, and community based grief and bereavement support for individuals impacted by dying, death, caregiving, grief, and loss. Rooted in HHA's Grief and Bereavement Domain of Care, the pathway recognizes that loss does not follow a timeline and that support is often needed long after a death has occurred.The pathway helps individuals, caregivers, and communities navigate the ongoing process of living with, adapting to, and integrating experiences of loss. It also acknowledges that the impact of dying, death, caregiving, and grief extends beyond immediate family members to include professional caregivers, front line workers, volunteers, friends, neighbours, and others who may be affected by these experiences. By fostering connection, reducing isolation, strengthening resilience, and building community capacity, Another Day helps ensure that people do not have to carry loss alone.
Key Components of the Another Day
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Support Circles: Community based gatherings where individuals can connect, share experiences, and receive grief and bereavement support while reducing isolation.
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Guided Bereavement Series: Structured opportunities for reflection, learning, and connection that support people navigating grief, including pregnancy and infant loss.
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Shared Experience Gatherings: Spaces that bring together people with similar experiences of loss, fostering understanding, connection, and mutual support.
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When There Are No Words Conversations: Open discussions that acknowledge often unseen or difficult experiences of grief and loss, helping participants feel heard and supported.
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Compassion in Action: Healing the Hearts of Front Line Workers: Support for professional caregivers and front line workers who regularly encounter dying, death, caregiving, and grief, helping strengthen resilience and well being.
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Debriefing: Confidential support for The Forgotten Responder, the person carrying the emotional impact of companioning someone through dying and death.
Compassionate Care Companioning
Compassionate Presence, Meaningful Connection, and Practical Support
Why this Matters
Caregivers are the foundation of end of life care, yet they are often the least supported. Most care is provided by unpaid caregivers who take on the emotional, physical, and practical responsibilities of supporting someone facing death, often while balancing work, family, and their own health. Unpaid caregivers contribute an estimated $4 billion in cost savings to Canada’s healthcare system each year, yet many experience burnout, stress, and isolation without consistent support. For every person facing death, at least five others are deeply affected, highlighting the scale of unmet need for caregiver focused support.
How Compassionate Care Companioning Responds
Compassionate Care Companioning helps ensure caregivers are supported throughout the full experience of care, not just in moments of crisis. It recognizes that caregiving is not only a set of tasks, but a deeply human experience that affects a person’s well being over time. By providing practical guidance, opportunities for rest, and spaces for reflection, caregivers are better able to stay present, connected, and supported in their role. This approach helps ensure caregivers do not have to carry the responsibility of care alone or at the expense of their own health.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Compassionate Caregiving combines training, respite, and experiential learning to support caregivers in ways that reflect real-life demands and pressures.
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Caregiver Learning and Support: Caregivers build confidence in how to support others through planning, presence, and grief, while also learning how to care for themselves along the way.
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Respite and Relief: Caregivers have opportunities to step away, rest, and tend to their own needs, knowing the person they are supporting is safe and cared for.
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Shared Understanding and Conversation: Caregivers and community members become more comfortable talking about illness, caregiving, and loss before a crisis occurs, helping make these conversations more natural and reducing isolation when they are needed most.
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Experiential Learning: Caregivers experience the same practices they offer to others, deepening their understanding of presence, compassion, and care.
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Inclusive Approaches to Caregiving: Support reflects the realities of diverse communities, ensuring caregiving approaches are relevant, respectful, and responsive to different lived experiences
Experiential Day Hospice
Creating Opportunities for Living Well Through Serious Illness
Why this Matters
A life-limiting diagnosis can quickly become the defining feature of a person’s life. While medical care focuses on treatment and outcomes, there are few structured opportunities for individuals to step outside of their illness and reconnect with who they are beyond it.
Advances in care have extended the length of the illness journey, but not always the quality of that time. Individuals and their caregivers often lack accessible, non-medical spaces that support living well alongside illness particularly in the earlier stages, when connection, identity, and meaning remain central.
How Experiential Day Hospice Responds
Experiential Day Hospice creates space for people to live fully in the time they have, not just be cared for within it. Rooted in an “if not now, when” mindset, it offers opportunities for people to experience moments of joy, connection, and meaning that might otherwise be out of reach. Through shared, social experiences, individuals are supported in maintaining their identity, building relationships, and engaging in life in ways that feel personal and real. At the same time, caregivers are given the opportunity to rest, knowing their loved one is supported in a safe, welcoming environment.
What This Looks Like in Practice
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A Day to Engage, Connect, or Simply Be: A full day where individuals can take part in shared experiences, connect with others, or choose quiet moments of presence in a relaxed, welcoming environment.
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Meaningful, Hands On Experiences: Opportunities to take part in creative and experiential activities that bring a sense of enjoyment, calm, and purpose into the day.
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Connection on Your Own Terms: Space to build relationships and share time with others, with each person free to speak about their experience or simply enjoy the moment.
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Time to Rest for Caregivers: Caregivers are able to step away and recharge, knowing their loved one is supported, engaged, and in a safe environment.
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Moments That Matter: Opportunities to create, reflect, and capture meaningful moments that can be shared with others or simply held for oneself
Helping Our Precious Pediatrics (HOPP)
Supporting Young People and Families Through Life's Most Difficult Experiences
Why this Matters
Families caring for a child with a life limiting illness face significant emotional, practical, and social challenges. While children seek joy, connection, and normalcy, families navigate complex care needs, uncertainty, and anticipatory grief. Siblings' needs are often overlooked, and access to pediatric palliative care remains uneven across Canada, particularly in rural, Indigenous, and underserved communities. Front line workers are frequently called to provide support without specialized pediatric training. As a result, families and those supporting them often lack the consistent, non medical support needed to stay connected and make the most of their time together.
How HOPP Responds
HOPP helps ensure families are supported throughout their child’s illness, not only at end of life, but across the full experience of care. It recognizes that support must extend beyond the child to include siblings, caregivers, and the people surrounding them. By creating opportunities for connection, shared experiences, and meaningful moments, children and families are able to spend time together in ways that reflect who they are, not just what they are facing. Siblings are included and supported, helping ensure they are not left to navigate the experience on their own. At the same time, HOPP helps strengthen the confidence and capacity of front line workers to support children and families with greater understanding and care. Together, this approach ensures families are better supported, more connected, and able to make the most of the time they have.
What This Looks Like in Practice
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HOPP Family Day: Families spend meaningful time together through shared experiences that include siblings and caregivers, helping ensure no one is left on the sidelines.
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HOPP Academy: Children take part in learning, play, and social connection in a supportive environment, helping maintain a sense of routine and normalcy while easing the pressure on caregivers.
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HOPP at Home: Caregivers are able to rest and step away, knowing their child is supported by someone they trust, making it possible to sustain care over time.
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C.A.N.D.Y. Café (Creating Awareness and Normalizing Death for Youth): Young people and the adults around them have space to ask questions and talk openly about dying, death, and grief, helping build understanding before a loss occurs and reducing isolation when it does.
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Inclusive Planning and Communication: Children and families are supported in expressing their wishes, preferences, and understanding of care in ways that reflect their abilities, identities, and lived experiences, ensuring planning is accessible, respectful, and meaningful for all.
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Emerging Pediatric Care Training: Work is underway to equip front line workers with the knowledge and confidence needed to support children and families facing serious illness and loss, helping ensure more families receive consistent, appropriate support across care settings.
(Your) Home Hospice
Bringing Community Based, Non Medical End of Life Care to where we Live and Love
Why This Matters
Access to hospice care in Canada is limited by cost, capacity, and location. Many communities do not have sufficient hospice beds, and hospital-based care often becomes the default during the final weeks of life. Nearly half of people with terminal illness are admitted to hospital to receive palliative care, and between 35% and 70% of deaths occur in hospitals despite most people expressing a desire to die in the place they call home. For those in long-term care, group homes, shelters, or other non-traditional settings, the gap is even greater. The result is that many people are separated from familiar environments, relationships, and control at the end of life.
How Your Home Hospice Responds
Your Home Hospice helps ensure people have access to compassionate support wherever they call home. Rather than relying on a dedicated facility, the program creates the conditions for hospice under any roof, whether in a private residence, long term care home, group home, shelter, correctional setting, or while living unhoused. Grounded in the Four Domains of Care, Your Home Hospice supports people through planning, meaning making, bedside presence, and grief, ensuring support is available when it is needed most and rooted in meaningful human connection. At the same time, Your Home Hospice strengthens community capacity by equipping individuals with the knowledge, confidence, and tools to support others through illness, caregiving, dying, death, and grief. By expanding the circle of care and increasing the number of people able to offer support, the program helps ensure care is not limited by setting, workforce, or circumstance. The result is a community based, non medical approach that enables people to remain connected, maintain dignity, and receive support that reflects their identities, cultures, and lived experiences.
What This Looks Like in Practice
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Culturally Grounded Care and Connection: Care is shaped by each person’s identity, culture, and lived experience, with space for traditions, beliefs, and ways of connecting that matter to them. This helps ensure support feels personal, respectful, and rooted in meaningful human connection.
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Support Across the Four Domains: Individuals and families are supported through planning, meaning making, bedside presence, and grief, helping ensure that no part of the experience is left unaddressed.
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Care in Any Setting: Support is provided wherever a person is living, whether at home, in long term care, a group home, a shelter, a correctional setting, or while living on the street, ensuring care is not limited by location.
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Meeting People Where They Are: Care is offered in ways that reflect each person’s circumstances, experiences, and needs, ensuring that individuals are supported with respect, dignity, and without judgment.
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Presence When It Matters Most:Trained individuals are available to offer companionship, guidance, and reassurance, including during the final hours, so that no one has to face this experience alone.
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Respecting Choice: Individuals are supported to explore and express their wishes, values, and decisions, including in complex situations, in ways that are informed, non-judgmental, and grounded in dignity.
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Strengthening the Circle of Care: Families, caregivers, and care teams are supported to work together, helping ensure care is shared, coordinated, and sustained over time.
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Building Community Capacity: More people are equipped with the knowledge, confidence, and tools to support others through illness, dying, and grief, increasing access to care across communities and settings.
Pre and Perinatal Hospice
Compassionate Care and Support Before, During, and After Pregnancy and Infant Loss
Why this Matters
Pregnancy and infant loss is far more common than most people realize, yet support remains inconsistent, fragmented, or absent altogether. Each year in Canada, 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in loss, and approximately 5,000 infants are stillborn. Despite these realities, individuals and families are often left to navigate miscarriage, medical termination, stillbirth, or neonatal death without coordinated, non-medical support—particularly during the time between diagnosis, delivery, and early grief, when decisions, emotions, and experiences are most complex.
How Pre and Perinatal Hospice Responds
Pre & Perinatal Hospice responds to this gap by providing continuous support from the earliest stages of pregnancy, and when a loss is expected during labour, before, during, and after the birth, ensuring people are not left to navigate these experiences alone. Support is available wherever a person is receiving care, helping ensure access is not limited by setting. Through planning, memory making and acknowledgment, support at the bedside, and ongoing support after, care is available at every stage of the experience. At the same time, this approach strengthens the number of people able to provide this support by equipping individuals across communities with the knowledge, confidence, and tools to walk alongside others through pregnancy, birth, loss, and grief.
Together, this approach offers practical guidance, emotional support, and meaningful human connection, helping individuals feel supported, understood, and less alone.
What This Looks Like in Practice
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Support Before, During, and After Birth: Individuals receive guidance, presence, and support at the time of diagnosis, during delivery, and in the days that follow, ensuring they are not left to navigate these moments alone.
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Memory Making and Acknowledgment: Opportunities are created to honor and acknowledge each life through meaningful acts of remembrance, helping individuals carry these experiences in ways that feel personal and supported.
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Shared Spaces for Grief and Connection: Ongoing gatherings and structured group experiences provide space to process and integrate loss over time, helping individuals feel less alone.
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Equipping Those Who Provide Care: Professionals and community members are trained to offer informed, compassionate support in cases of pregnancy and infant loss, strengthening the quality of care across settings.
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Expanding Access Through Training Support: Scholarships and funding pathways make it possible for more people to access training, increasing the number of individuals able to provide support within their communities.
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Inclusive and Responsive Approaches: Support reflects the diverse experiences, beliefs, and needs of those being served, ensuring care is offered with sensitivity, respect, and understanding.
The Bello Project
Honouring the Human Animal Bond Through Illness, Dying, Death, and Grief
Why this Matters
For many people facing death, concern for the well-being of their pet is one of the most distressing and unresolved questions they carry. At the same time, pets experience confusion, disruption, and loss when their person becomes ill or dies, often without continuity of care or familiar support. Each year, more than 300,000 people in Canada face death, and more than half are pet owners. Despite the depth of this bond, there is little structured support that recognizes and responds to the relationship between a person and their pet at the end of life. As a result, both are often left to navigate separation, transition, and loss without guidance or support.
How The Bello Project Responds
The Bello Project helps ensure people facing death can remain connected to their pets, while also preparing for times of change. Through practical support and thoughtful planning, it maintains the bond between a person and their pet throughout illness and into transition, ensuring neither is left without care. By addressing both the emotional and practical realities of pet care at end of life, The Bello Project brings peace of mind to the person who is dying and continuity of care for the pet who remains, helping both experience less disruption, uncertainty, and separation.
What This Looks Like in Practice
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Support to Stay Together: People are supported to continue caring for their pets through assistance with daily needs such as walking, feeding, grooming, and transportation, helping ensure the bond is maintained for as long as possible.
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Planning for What Comes Next: When a change in care is needed, individuals are supported to make decisions about their pet’s future, including selecting and preparing for a new home, ensuring continuity, dignity, and peace of mind.
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Connection Through Transition: Support is available to help people and those around them navigate separation and change, including opportunities to acknowledge and honour the relationship in meaningful ways.
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Equipping Those Who Provide Care: Care providers, volunteers, and teams are supported to understand the role of pets in people’s lives, helping ensure this relationship is recognized and respected within care environments.
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Normalizing the Bond and the Loss: Through conversation, awareness, and shared understanding, the relationship between a person and their pet is recognized as an important part of the end-of-life experience, helping reduce stigma and silence around this form of loss.
Strengthen Community Based, Non Medical End of Life Care
Strong communities don’t happen by accident. They are built by people who show up, organizations that step forward, and partners who choose to act.
Bring This Work to Your Community Partner with Home Hospice Association to introduce these programs in your organization or community. We work alongside you to implement practical, community-based approaches to supporting experiences of dying, death, and grief.
Be Part of the Work Join a growing network of practitioners, volunteers, and community leaders who are prepared to support others in real-life situations. Through structured training and shared approaches, you can play a direct role in strengthening how your community responds.
Support the Expansion of Care Your support helps ensure that more communities have access to meaningful, non-medical end-of-life care. Together, we can expand this work so that no one faces these experiences without support.
Start the Conversation Talk about this work within your organization, workplace, or community. Increasing awareness is the first step toward making support more visible, accessible, and understood.
Take the Next Step Whether you are looking to bring a program into your community, get involved directly, or support this work, we are ready to connect.
You are helping ensure that people facing dying, death, and grief are supported in the moments that matter most and wherever they call home. You are helping prepare practitioners, strengthen local response, and making care possible where it does not currently exist. You are making peace, compassion and culturally sensitive human connection possible so that no one dies alone or in distress.
Those who are Expanding Care for Their Clients
