Facilitator: Yvette Perreault & Betty Ann Rutledge

For many community agencies, dealing with death and loss is a difficult but expected occupational reality. Many workers in our sector have experienced losses due to death or significant life passages – both at a personal or professional level.  Grief-informed policies, procedures, staff training, and human interactions can support the development of agency responses comprehensive enough to manage the challenges of ongoing loss and transition, including the difficult reality of death and traumatic events.

This training will provide an orientation to the broad range of assessment and intervention skills for supporting ourselves, our teams and our agencies in loss situations. As managers and colleagues, supporting one another to collaboratively respond to these loss events can help create healthy workplaces, spirited teams and more resilient workers.

Using a combination of presentation, reflective activities and group interaction, this adult education learning opportunity will assist managers, colleagues and peers to work with grief and loss in these 3 areas:

• Support for bereaved workers as individuals
• Support for a team when death or loss occurs as part of the work
• Support for the organization when there are significant changes in the workplace not necessarily related to death, but generating a loss/stress response

Learning Objectives:

• To deepen awareness of the impact of ongoing multiple losses on our service-users, in ourselves as workers, and within our teams and agencies as a whole
• To better understand the range of diverse responses to traumatic grief and multiple loss in this sector
• To come away with a theoretical framework for multiple loss impact in marginalized communities and community agencies
• To investigate current coping strategies and strategies of resilience that emerge when people are faced with ongoing loss events
• To provide examples of effective Impact Debriefing techniques and structures for “Saying a Good Good-bye” that support workers and teams responding to a variety of losses

TARGET GROUP: All