In Conversation with Dr. David Weaver and Dr. Donna Gaffney: A Ground-Breaking Study on the Educational, Health, and Economic Outcomes of Parentally Bereaved Children
*This playback is available to active NACG Members Only.
In Conversation with Dr. David Weaver and Dr. Donna Gaffney: A Ground-Breaking Study on the Educational, Health, and Economic Outcomes of Parentally Bereaved Children
Peer Deaths: Supporting Students Grieving within the context of Racial Trauma & during COVID-19
*This playback is available to active NACG Members Only.
A Grief Group for Today’s Teens: Leveraging Human-Centered Design, Technology, and Teen Insights
The Rhythm of Emotion: The Use of Music Therapy to Give Voice to Grieving Children & Adolescents
This presentation will explore the use of music therapy as a powerful tool for grieving children and adolescents. Participants will have the opportunity to gain information and knowledge about the interconnection between child and adolescent grief and music therapy, discover ways of incorporating music therapy techniques with this population through clinical examples and guided practice, and engage in music therapy experiences that may be used in self-exploration of their own grief journey.
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →
In Today’s World: Cultivating Collective Intercultural Wellbeing and a Sense of Belonging in the Community
In today’s multiple pandemics of oppression, mass trauma, forced migration, COVID-19, and climate change, there is sustained traumatic stress with corresponding opportunities to heal. Historic, collective, and intergenerational trauma have spread dis-ease throughout human nature. Humanity has experienced more and more fragmentation, collective violence, and isolation.
In this workshop attendees will begin to understand the effects of collective loss due to war, persecution, and terrorism, its impact on children and families, as well as healing through the re-establishment of belonging. “Humans sitting within trauma from war, persecution, and terrorism tell us over and over again how much the systems of oppression need to change for healing to occur. In fact, they state that the first step in healing is not so much about revealing the darkest traumatic memories. The greatest healing, they report, is having a sense of belonging in the community.” (St. Thomas, Sheffield and Johnson. (2024) Collective Trauma and Human Suffering.)
Participants will learn the growing pains and evolution of a 25 year old bereavement and intercultural program. We will share a documentary film on collective loss produced by the Intercultural Advisory Council at the Center for Grieving Children in Maine. This documentary shares the added complexities of cross cultural definitions of collective loss, grief, as well as acculturative stress. We will explore inhibitors of cross-cultural communication and the five essentials of collective healing towards belonging.
Target Audience: Counselors, Social workers, Bereavement support professionals
Instructional Level: Novice – This best describes a topic or issue that the prospective audience is encountering for the first time in a meaningful way.
Format: Live Interactive Webinar
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →
Objectives:
After attending this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Identify at least three strategies in bringing belonging to intercultural settings.
- Identify the top three inhibitors to cross-cultural communication.
- Learn the five essentials to collective healing.
- Explore and identify at least one initiative in implementing collective healing into their organization.
- Identify at least two added barriers to healing when resettling from war and persecution.
Speaker Bio:
Marie Sheffield, MA, LCPC, is a clinical counselor, art therapist, co-author and interculturalist, working in the field of mass trauma, intercultural communication and collective healing. In addition to being an adjunct professor at University of Southern Maine, she has spent two decades enhancing and implementing a collective healing and intercultural model with those resettling from war and persecution. Additionally, over the course of ten years, Marie was one of two mental health consultants for America’s Camp, a six day overnight camp supporting children who lost a parent(s) on 9.11, or in the course of duty. At the Center for Grieving Children, while developing intercultural and diversity training curriculum, she established an Intercultural Advisory Council producing documentary films and community conversations across differences. Marie also completed a fellowship with the Intercultural Communication Institute. Since then, Marie has become a senior facilitator of Personal Leadership (plseminars.com) and incorporates this model in all of her work. As co-founder of Bridge to Belong Consulting (bridge2belong.com), her training and consultations are focused on bringing skills of collective healing support into the healthcare, education and community systems.
Justine Mugabo, BS, is the Intercultural Program Coordinator at the Center for Grieving Children. She works with facilitators in social and educational institutions to provide collective healing support and growth for children resettling from war and persecution. She states that her passion is to “help people in achieving their dreams and goals.” According to Justine, “Our goal at the Center is to help children and families to find hope and love and increase belonging in order to express feelings safely relative to the grief and loss. Such building of community resilience is a resource to persevere in the World.”
Justine is a Board Member for In Her Presence, an immigrant owned non-profit supporting asylum seeking women in navigating pathways forward. She collaborates in developing policy, programming, and resources and provides direct support. She also spends her time on the board of Double Hope Children, an immigrant owned non-profit working to support the needs of children resettling from war and persecution.
Before resettling into the United States herself, Justine worked in customer service management with the Mobile Telephone Network of Rwanda. With her lived experience, training and leadership position Justine has developed effective skills in intercultural communication, collective healing support and knowledge.
The Future of Grief Camps: Themes and Standards in a Changing World
There are so many ways we are seeing shifts in how we support youth and families experiencing grief, from shifting camp models to creating more accessibility throughout a program. While there is so much power in how diverse bereavement camps have become, it can also feel important to come back together as a field to collectively share our foundation for these camps and how we plan to move forward as a field.
Join us for a panel discussion where professionals from the bereavement and camp fields come together to highlight important themes and standards for bereavement camps today and looking forward. Topics such as expanding the definition of wellbeing to actively working on creating equitable and inclusive camp spaces. The panel will share their thoughts around these important themes and more. We will also address the updated Bereavement Camp Standards of Practice as a practical tool for the bereavement and camp fields.
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →
Target Audience: Counselors, Social workers, Bereavement support professionals
Instructional Level: Basic – This best describes a topic or issue that the prospective audience is encountering for the first time in a meaningful way
Format: Live Interactive Webinar with panel discussion
Objectives:
After attending this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Investigate key themes in the bereavement camp field where shifts are being seen.
- Inform bereavement professionals of the free Bereavement Camp Standards of Practice resource to help inform bereavement camp standards across the field.
- Appraise minimum practices and standards to ensure a safer bereavement camp experience for participants.
Speaker Bio:
Kiri Meyer (Moderator and Panelist) is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Wisconsin, a Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC), and a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-200). Kiri has spent over a decade helping to support individuals and families of all ages through individual/family counseling and camp-based programs. Kiri supports camp and other non-profit programs by acting as a Mental Health Professional throughout the camp program or as needed for other programs. She has conducted trainings in the areas of trauma and bereavement throughout her professional career and is now part of the Eluna Camp Erin team helping to support professionals in the Camp Erin network.
Dr. Tina Barrett (Panelist) is the Executive Director/Co-founder of Tamarack Grief Resource Center in Montana. Since 1994, Barrett has specialized in family systems, strength-oriented and outdoor-based support following grief and trauma. Her doctoral research illuminated benefits of youth bereavement camps. Over the past 30 years, Barrett has focused on best practices of nature-based support with trauma survivors and family-systems. She has designed and directed various models of grief camps for youth, teens, women, families, and professionals in Montana and six other states including A Camp to Remember which she launched in 1997. She served on the Board of Directors for the National Alliance for Children’s Grief (NACG), and currently serves on the Leadership Team of Project Tomorrow Montana and the Advisory Board for Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. Barrett received the Community Educator Award from Association for Death Educators and Counselors (ADEC) in 2019.
John Hamilton, MA, (Panelist) is a strategic leader in the camp and out-of-school time (OST) space. He currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for the Alliance for Camp Health. John has a deep understanding of mental, emotional, and social health (MESH +) of youth and national program expansion. Prior to ACH he served as the national director for Camp HOPE America. John has an MA in Leadership and Cultural Justice, is the cofounder of the Outdoor Wellbeing Lab, and is a former executive director of a camp near Lake Tahoe.
Katie Hartley, LPC, has been a Licensed Professional Counselor since 1989 and has worked with children and youth her entire career. Her practice has included work with many populations, emphasizing developmental theory and non-verbal interactions utilizing the creative arts. Katie served as an adjunct professor at Drexel as well as internship supervisor for many years. She has worked in private practice, with school districts, developmental centers and created an arts center for therapeutic work. Katie’s current role at Penn Medicine is as a children’s bereavement coordinator and clinical director for Camp Erin (a weekend camp for grieving youth). She continues to use the creative arts and has completed MBSR training and uses mindfulness and meditation within her work often.
Brianne “Brie” Overton, FT, LPC, NCC, (Panelist) is the Chief Clinical Officer of Experience Camps, a national nonprofit that provides no-fee, clinically informed programs for kids who have experienced the death of a parent, sibling or primary caregiver – as well as resources and advocacy so all grieving children can live a life rich with possibility. Brie received her MA in Thanatology from Hood College, her M.Ed in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from University of Missouri – St. Louis, and is a doctoral candidate in counseling at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. She has spent 16 years in the field of thanatology providing grief education, support, counseling, death education, suicide prevention and intervention, and consultation.
Jason Stout, for more than two decades, has been helping youth and adults find their inner strength, form meaningful connections, and experience personal transformation through adventure challenge and time in nature. His passion for this work is rooted in the losses of his sister, grandmother, and father — all before Jason was 15 years old. He struggled to deal with these losses as a teen and adult, but he found purpose and healing after completing a 78-day Winter Wilderness Leadership Expedition. In honor of his dad and sister, Jason created a national wilderness program for at-risk and grieving teens, which was featured in Backpacker Magazine, The Denver Post, and the Associated Press. Jason is founder of Stoutreach LLC where he provides training, consultation, and facilitation to outdoor education, wilderness therapy, and gap year programs. In addition, he serves as an advisor to TAPS where he manages, develops, and facilitates a variety of programming including mindfulness and healing in nature for youth and adult military survivors. Previously he served Judi’s House as Outreach and Education Manager and Outward Bound as the National Outreach Director.
Compassion Fatigue in the Death Industry
While the value of compassion in deathcare has gained increased attention, it remains a neglected focus of training. Vicarious trauma leading to compassion fatigue is changing the way professionals think about self-care. Participants will explore how repeat exposure to traumatic deaths coupled with the constant output of empathy can affect their cognition and emotional balance, and learn 20 evidence-based techniques designed to mitigate the effects before it leads to career burnout.
Target Audience: Students, interns, individuals entering the field of childhood bereavement, new staff members, new counselors, group facilitators, volunteers, anyone who wants to invest in their practice.
Instructional Level: Novice – This best describes a topic or issue that the prospective audience is encountering for the first time in a meaningful way.
Format: Live Interactive Webinar
Objectives:
After attending this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Identify ways the concept of compassion fatigue applies to deathcare professionals.
- Self-assess cognitive, emotional and physical signs of compassion fatigue.
- Understand the complementary roles of stress management, resilience, and career longevity.
- Learn evidence-based techniques that mitigate negative work-related effects.
Speaker Bios:
Lynda Cheldelin Fell is founding partner of the International Grief Institute, and international bestselling author of over 35 books including the award-winning Grief Diaries series. With her background as a firefighter/EMT, Lynda specializes in trauma, grief, compassion fatigue, and holds a national certification in critical incident stress management. A popular keynote speaker and educator, she is a member of the continuing education faculty at Whatcom Community College. To research grief’s impact on society, she has interviewed people around the world including societal figures such as Martin Luther King’s daughter, and Heaven is For Real’s Pastor Todd Burpo. She has earned six national literary awards and five national advocacy award nominations for her work.
Centering Intersectionality Within the Field of Childhood Bereavement
It is commonly believed that grief is different for everyone and that we should not compare one child’s grief to another’s. Why can grief differ so much from one child to another, even within the same family system? When a child experiences a death loss, adults in their system may attribute a child’s thoughts and behaviors to being a “grief response” and center the child’s grief as their primary motivating factor. This unintentional oversimplification of what the child may be experiencing can make grief the only lens by which adults see children who are grieving. It can potentially harm a child’s health and well-being if supportive adults only see a child as a “single story.” This presentation will use the concept of intersectionality introduced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to help adults who support children see them as the complex, socially constructed people they are.
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →
Write Your Heart Out: Self Expression to cope with grief, loss, trauma, & stress
The W.H.O. recently reported COVID-19 pandemic has caused a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide and called for all countries to step up mental health services and support. Additionally, the coronavirus and the public health measures designed to prevent its spread have been shown to have had a profound negative effect on many young people. Writing and poetry are powerful tools to help process and cope not only with COVID-19 effects, but also for helping those dealing with grief, loss, trauma, and stress management in general. Yet, children, teens, and the adults in their lives often avoid writing because they think they aren’t a “good writer”. Attend this workshop to help them learn tools to overcome that negative self-talk barrier. Apply the research about free-form writing to help children and teens have a positive impact on healing and the immune system. In this interactive lecture/discussion, experiential, and personal reflection workshop, we will explore and experience poetry and written activities. Caring professionals can use the activities to help families process their grief and trauma, improve coping, and prevent stress & burnout.
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →
Using Fictional Characters to Help Children and Adolescents Who Are Grieving Live Interactive Webinar
Reading about fictional characters’ grief and loss experiences can help children and adolescents deal with their own grief and loss. Many stories written for children and adolescents, like the Harry Potter books, are filled with loss and death. But literature, like magic, can open new worlds for people, and show many possible ways to survive losses and challenges and even flourish beyond them. Using reading and storytelling to help to improve a person’s mental health is often referred to as bibliotherapy. This session will present activities based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to help children and adolescents deal with grief and loss, as well as activities based on other books to help children who are grieving (including Everett Anderson’s Long Goodbye, Charlotte’s Web, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Hunger Games). The session’s goal is to give participants many practical individual and group activities, including discussion questions, worksheets, and crafts, that can help children who are grieving.
This webinar playback is available for active NACG members only.
Not currently a member? Become a NACG member today! Your membership will provide access to free monthly webinars with CEs on current topics to support you in your work, discounts on educational events, access to all webinar playbacks, and more. To learn more and become a member to access this webinar for no additional cost, visit HERE →