The Kids and Families We Care For
Crescent Cove serves children with life-threatening conditions and the families who love them. There are around 9,000 children living in Minnesota with a life-threatening condition, and 600 more born each year. For many of these families, their only options for end-of-life for their child is a hospital or their own home, which, in many cases, is not an appropriate place. Crescent Cove exists as a supportive, compassionate third option.
Families Facing the Unimaginable
Twenty-five years ago, a child diagnosed with a life-threatening condition may not have been taken home from the hospital. Options for treatment were limited, and care decisions were very different.
Today, children often live longer with advanced medical care—but the responsibility for daily care and the extraordinary costs now fall largely on families.
Many parents are forced to leave work to provide round-the-clock support for their child. This loss of income makes it harder to:
- Pay for essential medical care
- Care for siblings and keep up with family routines
- Manage household needs like cooking and cleaning
- Find time for rest, joy, and quality family moments
Across Minnesota, thousands of families are living this reality. Crescent Cove exists to stand beside them—offering care, comfort, and community when the future they once dreamed for their child has been forever changed.
Why Crescent Cove?
Minnesota is home to world-class children’s hospitals and programs. These hospitals are essential for urgent treatments and acute care, but they are not always the best setting for respite or end-of-life care unless a child truly needs hospital-level support.
Even when hospitals make space for families—such as offering larger rooms for a child nearing the end of life—those rooms are often surrounded by the sounds and activities of acute medical care. This environment can feel far from peaceful or comforting.
That’s where Crescent Cove comes in. As Minnesota’s first and only pediatric hospice and respite care home, we provide a setting designed specifically for children with life-threatening conditions and their families. Here, children receive expert palliative care—focused on comfort, pain, and symptom management—during respite stays and at the end of life.
We work closely with each child’s primary medical team, ensuring care is seamless, compassionate, and centered on what matters most: giving children and families time together in a place of peace and love.
A Critical Gap in Care
In the United States, there are more than 47,000 hospice homes for adults—but only four designed specifically for children.
By comparison, the United Kingdom, with a population one-fifth the size of ours, has more than 50 children’s hospice homes. If the U.S. were meeting the same level of need, there would be over 260 children’s hospice homes across the country.
Crescent Cove is honored to be one of only four in the nation, and the only one in Minnesota—providing a vital service for families who otherwise would have nowhere else to turn.
