UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — People of color have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, yet there are often fewer resources available to grieving survivors in those communities.
“We need to be able to offer our services to everyone and make sure that no child is grieving alone,” said Cristina M. Chipriano, director of equity and community outreach for the Portland, Oregon-based Dougy Center for Grieving Children and Families.
Chipriano will be a panelist in a WPSU-produced webinar Aug. 30 on “Effective Outreach Strategies for Connecting Underserved Communities with Grief Support Services.” The webinar is part of WPSU’s Speaking Grief Initiative, a multimedia project that seeks to encourage a national conversation around normalizing grief. The initiative has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram.
The webinar will be held at 6 p.m. EDT. More information and registration details are available at speakinggrief.org/webinars.
Chipriano will be joined by panelists Judy Austin, director and lead therapist for The Grief Center of Southwest Colorado; Charise Hunter, coordinator for family group decision-making at Southern Ute Education Department, Tribal Courts, and Tribal Council; and Tashel Bordere, assistant professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Alica Forneret, founder and executive director of PAUSE, a project dedicated to supporting people of color through grief and end of life, will moderate the discussion.
Chipriano said she hopes the webinar will be seen by providers serving in rural or other communities with small minority populations that may get overlooked.
“I’m hoping that they will challenge themselves to reach those communities that are being disproportionately affected and that may not be reflected in their staff,” she said. “We have to get creative and not just say, ‘Here’s a Zoom link and connect when you can.’”
Other scheduled webinars are “The In-Between: Supporting Grieving Young Adults” on Sept. 28 and “Supporting Neurodivergent Grieving People” on Oct. 26.
Many more resources, including recordings of previous webinars, a documentary and interviews with grief experts, are available at SpeakingGrief.org. The resources were created to help people who are grieving, people who want to support others who are grieving, and anyone who just wants to understand more about grief, said Lindsey Whissel Fenton, WPSU senior producer.
“All of our resources were created to be extremely simple and actionable,” Fenton said. “Many people are grief avoidant. We don’t talk about it, so we don’t understand it, and we’re scared of things we don’t understand. But we know more than we think; we grieve lots of things throughout our lives.”
Major funding for the Speaking Grief initiative is provided by the New York Life Foundation.