Brave Penny

Brave Penny is a grief ministry providing Christian based resources for those who have suffered all types of grief and loss. We offer in-person and online grief recovery classes, training for those who minister to the grieving, and books and materials to support grief recovery.

The Executive Director and founder of Brave Penny, Sharon Fox, a Certified Grief Facilitator, developed and has delivered the Shadowlands program for recovery from grief and loss for many years. Shadowlands has grown from an in-person offering twice a year at Sharon's home church to being offered both in-person and online multiple times per year, and has been licensed to several other churches in the Dallas area and across the country. Shadowlands differs from some other Christian grief programs in that it addresses not just the death of a loved one, but the grief experienced by those who suffer many other types of loss as well.

Heather Rodriguez, co-founder of Brave Penny, is a Birthmother who gifted her child through adoption to another family. She experienced significant grief from her brave choice. Sharon recognized that Birthmothers like Heather grieved their loss in non-traditional ways. For a Birthmother, an adoption is not the death of her child, but the death of a dream to parent and nurture her child. The book "Reframing Adoption" by Sharon refined the basic recovery principles and processes of Shadowlands to support the specific to the needs of Birthmothers. Sharon's second book "A Precious Loss" is a companion to another grief recovery program, Precious Losses, which was designed for families who have experienced infant death through miscarriage, stillbirth, illness, as well as infertility.

Since its formation in 2013, Brave Penny has expanded and further tailored the Shadowlands and Precious Losses  grief recovery programs to address other specific forms of grief, including:

Individual losses such as job, foreclosure, abortion, and addiction

Families coping with the loss of an adult child or loved one due to suicide

Families coping with dementia, Alzheimers, or another terminal diagnosis

Individuals who have been incarcerated

Our Needs

Your financial support of Brave Penny will allow us to expand the development and implementation of training programs to reach a larger group of caregivers to include clergy, lay-leaders, and compassionate friends to minister more effectively to those who grieve.

When we began, our mission was focused on delivering Shadowlands directly to churches, by leading the sessions in-person. We then added online courses via Zoom that enabled us to minister to people across the United States, Canada, and other countries. The next step was to train individuals and teams to deliver the program at the organization level by creating internet-delivered training to similar individuals or teams who will in turn lead the efforts within their own organizations. The audiences for training now include Chaplaincy teams, St. Stevens Ministry teams, Crisis Response Ministers, adoption agency staff and even organizations assisting prisoners and newly released offenders. We are currently working to translate our Shadowlands course materials into Spanish and hope to soon be able to reach Spanish-speaking communities in need of grief ministry.