We know first hand that working in grief and bereavement can be a lonely job. Depending on your practice setting, you may only have a handful of other grief professionals at your organization, or you may be in private practice or working virtually from home, feeling more disconnected than ever.

Over the years, we've heard so many of the same things from folks --

• I wish I had a place beyond just my small group of local colleagues to get professional advice and feedback on everything from client challenges to grief programming.
• It's hard to sift through and stay on top of the latest grief literature and resources when so much of my time is spent doing direct service work.
• I have a big library of grief tools I'd be happy to share and would love to see tools other use, but there isn't a good space for that.
• It is great connecting with other professionals in the chat or in person at grief continuing education workshops - I wish there was a way to stay connected and keep those conversations going.
• I'm in some Facebook end-of-life/grief professional networking groups, but the engagement and functionality are limited and they are narrowly focused on one grief practice setting, so I'm not getting as much from it as I'd like. .
• I'm a general practice social worker/therapist/counselor and I have an interest in grief, but don't have connections in my location community to help me learn and grow. I wish there was a better place to connect online.

These are many of the same things we've felt and said ourselves over the years! Just as we created What's Your Grief to fill a gap for grievers, after years of hearing people discuss this professional gap, we finally decided we were going to do our best to fill it too.

We've created a professional community space that has the functionality to address the need for community that so many of us feel as grief professionals. We hope this space can bring people in the field together to connect, learn, share, support, and grow no matter our different regions and different areas of grief practice.

Grief Professional Online Community

What is it exactly?

It's an online community, away from social media, that offers:

• An Open Discussion Forum: This is a general space for questions and discussion - a catch-all to discuss any grief topics. As professionals who have the luxury of some time scheduled in to keep on top of new research and articles, we'll use this to share interesting new literature we see and hope others will do the same!
• Community Learning and Discussion Events: We will hold live community events via Zoom and other formats, like live chats. We currently have a series of weekly daytime informal learning sessions and discussions scheduled on various grief topics. We share the recordings for those who can't join live.
• A Monthly Grieving as a Grief Professional Group: to chat about the challenges of grieving as a grief professional!
• Book Club: A bi-monthly book club. The book we choose will be relevant to the grief professional community somehow. This book club discussion is on zoom and, when possible, we have the authors join us.
• Tools and Resources: This is a space to share and browse useful tools, resource suggestions, etc. We'll get it started with some WYG worksheets, but we hope this space will become a growing community library.
• Community Bulletin Board: This is a space to share announcements like new projects and upcoming events that might be of interest to other community members.
• Private messaging and group messaging: Private messaging and group messaging are available for members who want to connect with other members directly.

Who exactly is a 'grief professional'?

 We define "grief professional" broadly. This is because so many roles and professions intersect with people experiencing loss. For example, therapists, social workers, funeral professionals, chaplains, school counselors, educators, doctors, nurses, doulas, and the list goes on. 

We want anyone wishing to be better at the parts of their job that require understanding and supporting grief to have the help they need. So ultimately, this community is for anyone working in a formal capacity to support and assist grieving people. The better the grief support available, the better off we all are. 

Is this community a good fit for me?

Well, we obviously can't tell you for sure. The purpose of this community is to connect around the values of sharing, collaboration, mentorship, support, and education. As we write this, the community is new. We have an idea of how we would like it to look, but ultimately, each of you who join will help create it. But we think this will probably be a pretty good fit for you if you:

• Love learning more about grief, at any stage of your professional career
• Like connecting with other grief professionals and don't feel like you get to do it often enough, or it is always the same people.
• Want more ways to keep up on new grief books, research, and theory.
• Wish you had people doing similar work who you could ask questions of and discuss professional challenges.
• Never miss a chance to watch and talk about new shows and movies with grief themes.

I'm guessing this isn't free, so how much is it going to put me out?

Membership is $100/year if you join annually (that's about $8.33/month. How many cups of coffee that is varies greatly depending on where you buy your coffee). You can also join month-to-month for $10/month.

And don't worry, if you join and you don't feel like it's for you, just let us know and we'll refund you!

Organizations of 5 or more who would like to join as a group received a 20% off discount. Contact WYG for details at whatsyourgrief@gmail.com.

Alright, it all sounds great, but I'm still on the fence. Anything else to sweeten the pot?

Yes! We'll add different perks from month-to-month. However, members of this community will always receive 20% off registration for all WYG Continuing Education Workshops. And members will also always get 10% off of WYG's print materials. Once you join and login you'll be able to access codes and other perks in the 'Monthly Member Benefit' section.

Or just click here to poke around a little bit and see what's there.

Still have questions? Email whatsyourgrief@gmail.com