Upcoming Grief Ritual Events
By Evan Wagoner, Facilitator & Founder of Alliance for Common Ground
We are hosting two more grief rituals this spring. You are welcome to join us, no matter who you are, no matter your relationship to grief. Registration and more details can be found in the links below:
March Ritual
Saturday, March 21 at Woodard Lane Cohousing
April Ritual
Saturday, April 18 at the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation
What to expect: We will spend the better part of a day together, get to know one another, talk about our grief, and hold a grief ritual together. At the ritual people can participate however they wish. There are opportunities to grieve or support, all in a supportive group container, and with the aid of music, singing, poetry, and natural beauty. We finish with a shared meal.
You can help us conduct this work by joining us, or spreading the word about our events, or in a few other ways (see below).
The Alliance
We are working towards the creation of The Alliance for Common Ground, a non-profit to support these types of community resiliency events. Our vision is a transformed society in which we gather for healing, repair, and positive action. We will get there by remembering how to be together, through events like grief rituals and song circles.
The Olympia Community Grief Rituals are our first offering. We are doing something unusual, which is to offer these rituals by donation. We also ran a small grief ritual in a Washington State prison this month—another setting where this work is desperately needed and where we will need to find funding.
Once the non-profit is up and running, we will be able to finance these events through grants and other sources. At present, however, we are unable to adequately pay our facilitators, or provide food and childcare based on the donations we are collecting through our events.
Fortunately, we have our first sponsor in the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Reverend Mary and the congregation have made these events possible through the generous donation of the church facility.
You can follow our progress through our newsletter.
How to help
We are actively seeking a fiscal sponsor, a non-profit that would help us apply for grants. If you know of an organization that might be interested, please let us know.
We also are seeking help in defraying facilitator costs, and in providing dinner, and childcare for our participants. We could also use volunteers to help us set up and break down these events.
We are also seeking housing for our facilitator team, some of whom are coming from two hours away to help us with these events. We are seeking accommodation for 4-5 people on March 21-22 and April 18-19.
If you’d like to help in any way, please contact us.
