WHEN Bobbi MacIntyre is asked to think back on the happiest memories she has of her Gran, she smiles warmly and says she doesn't know where to start, as she has so many.

The 12-year-old from Giffnock was very close to her Gran, Mary Ashmead, and devastated when she died of cancer five years ago.

Thanks to the help and support of the Butterfly Project at the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, Bobbi learned how to cope with her grief and channel it into positive feelings.

"When I came in at first I thought, 'Oh, I don't know'," remembers Bobbi. "I didn't think it was going to help. I thought it was just going to be talking about things, but it really helped me so much.

"Obviously I'm going to miss my Gran still, but it has made such a difference."

Every Monday after school for a couple of months after Mary died, Bobbi and her mum Donna visited the hospice. While the children - every one of them with a relative suffering from life-threatening or life-limiting illness - took part in group activities, the parents had a chance to talk.

"We made a salt jar with salt and chalk and every colour represented something about the person we had lost," says Bobbi, a pupil at St Ninian's High School in Giffnock.

"I chose brown for my Gran's hair, pink for her dressing gown, purple for her slippers and green for her eyes.

"It helped me a lot. It just gave me hope that I would be able to cope without Gran, and it gave my mum hope.

"If other children don't think it will help by coming in to the project I would say that's what I thought - but when I came in it was totally different. Don't make your mind up until you try it, because it works."

Mary only had a short time after her diagnosis, and though she didn't want to go into the hospice for treatment, she encouraged her daughter Donna to talk to doctors and staff.

It was on one of these visits when Donna heard about plans to set up the Butterfly Project, which received funding for five years, recently ending in October, though the hospice has pledged to continue the service.

Donna says she was concerned because Bobbi, who was only seven at the time, was so young when she lost her Gran.

"I thought, what about the kids? It's hard enough for us to work our way through it but how will Bobbi cope?" explains Donna.

"Kids are often forgotten about but they have feelings. They get confused, upset and angry. My concern was what was there for them?"

Not only has the project helped Bobbi cope with her grief, she has passed on the experiences to come to the assistance of friends who have lost a relative.

"We can't take the pain away. We still feel her loss all the time and always will, but we've used that experience to try and help others," says Donna proudly. "It's not something you can teach.

"What I saw with the kids is that unspoken thing, they just know how each other feels. They understand without having to go into a big explantation about it."

The Butterfly Project was the idea of chief executives at three hospices: the Prince and Princess of Wales in Glasgow, St Vincent's in Howwood and Ardgowan in Greenock. Originally set up in November 2009, they had noticed a lack of bereavement services for children across those areas and put together the application for Big Lottery funding. Each site operates a different model, depending on the local demographic but all ensure bereavement care for young people is provided.

The Butterfly Project at the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice offers a range of services, from offering support to parents to working with teachers and providing group and one-to-one counselling and therapy.

"We have a couple of art therapists who help young people express how they are feeling," says Linda McEnhill, hospice manager of family support services.

"Within the groups we do a lot of activities, things like making a memory jar, decorating a bauble to put on the Christmas tree to remember the person who has died and framing photographs of them.

"And we have one of our doctors come along and answer anonymous questions from the children like, 'Can you catch cancer from somebody? Or, why do people die?' "

The project is not just for children who have relatives at the hospice but all youngsters in the city who have someone suffering from a life-threatening or life-limiting illness.

l Visit www.ppwh.org.uk