Child Life Disaster Relief

Child Life Disaster Relief (CLDR) is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization founded in 2016 by a Certified Child Life Specialist (CCLS) whose professional formation and ethical commitments were shaped by an early recognition of a critical gap in disaster response. When the Haiti earthquake occurred in 2010, CLDR’s founder felt a deep responsibility to use her professional skills to help children cope with the devastating aftermath. She actively searched for organizations providing structured coping support for children in disaster settings, hoping to join an existing response. Unable to identify any coordinated effort or pathway for this work, and ultimately unable to deploy to Haiti, she began a long process of inquiry and learning that would later inform the creation of CLDR.

During this period, she attended disaster response conferences and engaged directly with leaders in the field, consistently asking two foundational questions: Is there a need for specialized coping support for children in disasters? And if so, how can that need be met ethically and effectively? Through this exploration, she discovered Children’s Disaster Services (CDS), an organization providing play-based support for children following disasters in the United States. She became a CDS volunteer, gaining firsthand experience in disaster settings and developing a clearer understanding of how Certified Child Life Specialists, professionals trained in child development, stress, trauma, coping, and family systems, could contribute at a deeper professional level.

This experience proved formative. With the support and collaboration of CDS, CLDR’s founder began recruiting CCLSs to serve on CDS disaster response teams, ultimately engaging approximately 1,000 CCLSs in deployment trainings for responses, over time. These efforts highlighted both the value of professional child life services in disaster contexts and the absence of a dedicated organization focused specifically on utilizing professionals who specialize in children’s emotional and developmental needs. In response, CLDR was established as an independent nonprofit organization in 2016. Today, CLDR deploys both independently and in collaboration with partner organizations such as CDS, while maintaining its own standards, training, and ethical frameworks. CLDR subsequently developed a rigorous vetting and training process for CLDR Responders (all Certified Child Life Specialists), along with an evidence-based Trauma Mitigation Model focused on tangible, developmentally appropriate methods for supporting children’s coping during disasters and crises. These structures were designed to ensure that care for children affected by disaster is not improvised or informal, but professional, ethical, and grounded in best practices.

CLDR was founded on a simple but radical premise:

Children affected by disaster deserve the same level of professional, ethical care for their emotional well-being as they do for their physical safety- regardless of who they are, where they live, or whether responders know them.