Why We Build

I hadn’t slept. It was five in the morning, and I was standing alone in the Foggy Bottom Metro station in Washington, DC, waiting for the first train of the day. Six hours earlier, my life changed. My mother called and told me that our father had died. I was going across town to American University to deliver that news to my sister, Sarah.

I wasn’t thinking about what lay ahead. Life was, in that moment, very simple. I was going to get my sister. We were going to get the train to BWI. We were going to be with our family. We were going to go home. I only had to figure out what to say.

In the days and weeks that followed, we did what many students do: we went back to class. I finished my senior year. Sarah continued with her studies. Life on campus resumed, at least on the surface. But something essential had shifted.

The world kept moving around us, but we stood still.

Some professors showed grace and understanding. Others met us with indifference and skepticism. Some friendships deepened, others faded. There were counselors who helped us find our footing. But there was no real path. No institutional map for how to navigate grief. Not just emotionally, but practically.

That was our first glimpse of a larger truth.

In the years after our father’s death, we learned firsthand how little grace is built into the structure of American life for the bereaved. You may navigate society as an individual, but when you’re grieving, your relationship to institutions becomes unavoidably central.

It is in the wake of loss that you must make phone calls, fill out forms, show up to work, submit papers, pay bills, and perform the everyday logistics of being a person.

The world doesn’t pause for your sorrow.

The founding of the BUILD Coalition came from this recognition: bereavement is not just personal, it is infrastructural. And our institutions—from schools to employers, banks to tech companies—are not yet built to meet the needs of the grieving.

BUILDco exists to change that. This autumn, with the launch of BUILD Campus, we will return to the place where many young people navigate their first profound loss. Where we did.

In recent months, we’ve developed a full suite of core resources that BUILD Campus will offer to students and schools alike: chapter charters, organizational templates, speaker guides, and discussion frameworks. In many ways, it’s been like building a second organization from the ground up. These resources are designed to meet students where they are and support them in shaping their own responses to loss.

We look forward to sharing more in the coming months about the official launch of BUILD Campus. We know personally that what begins on campus can ripple outward—changing not just individual lives, but the culture around loss itself. We’re honored to be building this with you.

- Matt Grifferty, Co-Founder