The purpose of this series of online seminars is to bring the concept of Grief Literacy to life by highlighting its various aspects and broad impact. There are seven one-hour seminars planned with international leaders in the field of Grief Literacy research and practice between September 2024 and March 2025. Each seminar will involve 30 minutes of presentation followed by 30 minutes of questions and dialogue. This seminar on 14 January is the fifth seminar.
Seminar 5: Grief Literacy, societal impact
Sue Ryder, the leading UK palliative care and bereavement charity has built a multi-level, multi-systems approach to palliative care and bereavement. We apply the 95% rule to everything we do, equip the 100% and provide for the 5%. Our Grief Kind campaign, a national movement of kindness around grief, aims to open up conversations about grief and give people the tools and resources they need to support each other. Through our public health approach to grief literacy we have delivered Grief Kind podcasts, training and webinars and secured numerous radio interviews and articles in the national, regional and consumer press. In this presentation, I will showcase how Sue Ryder is leading the way in equipping people to support themselves and each other through grief.
Click here to register for free
Speaker: Bianca Neumann-Morris (UK)
Assistant Director of Bereavement at Sue Ryer, Psychologist and bereavement expert, fellowship in palliative care, PhD candidate at the renowned end-of-life observatory at Lancaster University, finalist at NHS innovation awards, presented internationally on bereavement.
Attendance at this seminar is free. After registration the zoom link will be sent to you a few days before the seminar. More information and registration for other seminars go to the overview below.
Background Series of online Seminars on Grief Literacy
Grief and loss are fundamentally human experiences, touching on a very universal and existential layer of life. Yet there is great embarrassment in societies around this topic. Grief Literacy is a concept coined in 2020 by a sub-group of the International Workgroup for Death Dying Bereavement (IWGDDB). Grief Literacy is: a) The capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss. b) This capacity is multidimensional: it comprises knowledge to facilitate understanding and reflection, skills to enable action, and values to inspire compassion and care. c) These dimensions connect and integrate via the interdependence of individuals within socio-cultural contexts (Breen et al., 2020). The transformative value of the concept consists in making visible the extent to which current societies or cultures avoid grief and helping us to formulate new strategies to address it. Specifically, it addresses a lack of appropriate compassionate responses to people in mourning.
The purpose of this series of online seminars is to bring the concept of Grief Literacy to life by highlighting its various aspects and broad impact. We hope this series will contribute to a greater awareness and sensitivity of how people respond to their own grief or the grief of others, and will lead to an increase in the compassionate support of ordinary people among themselves.