Set Apart, Together
BUILD Campus empowers students to confront grief, navigate loss, and reimagine how institutions respond to death.
What is BUILD Campus?
BUILD Campus is a chapter-based initiative empowering students to take bereavement seriously. Not just as an emotional experience, but as a civic and institutional reality.
Each chapter serves as a meeting place for students who have experienced personal loss, and for those who want to think more clearly about how death and grief are handled in campus life and beyond.
Chapters are flexible by design. Some may focus on peer dialogue. Others may host speakers, lead campus events, or advocate for better policies around bereavement. What unites them is a shared belief: that grief deserves structure, reflection, and a space within public life.
BUILD Campus is not a therapy group. It is a framework for leadership, inquiry, and cultural change—led by students, informed by loss, and grounded in the life of the university.
Why It Matters
Grief is universal. Yet most institutions are unprepared for it.
On college campuses, death is often treated as an outlier, as if students should simply “manage it” and move on. But over the course of an undergraduate degree, around 60% of students experience bereavement. Bereavement isn’t a detour from campus life. For many, it becomes a defining feature.
Students experiencing loss often find themselves navigating new academic challenges, strained relationships, and a lack of formal guidance—all while being expected to carry on as normal. Some find support. Most are left to improvise.
BUILD Campus exists because there is no common blueprint. There are no widely accepted norms. The structure is missing and that absence sends a message: that grief is too private to be integrated into public life.
We believe that message is wrong. And that students are capable of something better.
How It Works
BUILD Campus operates through student-led chapters, each shaped by the character of its school and the interests of its members.
Chapters may be started by one student or a small group. From there, students invite others to join and set the direction of their work, in collaboration with BUILDco.
Chapters are encouraged to use the unique resources of campus life—seminar rooms, guest speakers, faculty allies, research opportunities—to explore and elevate conversations around grief and death.
Each chapter is free to decide what it offers. Some may organize reading groups or public discussions. Others may host events on cross-cultural mourning, historical rituals, or institutional policy. Some may simply meet to reflect on personal experience in less structured settings.
BUILD Campus will also welcome chapters to contribute to BUILDco’s larger mission of improving how institutions support the bereaved.
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