Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium
Delaware’s Grief Awareness Week with events throughout November.
Throughout the year, the Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium brings together people with a professional and/or personal interest in bereavement, to expand knowledge of the grieving process, and to foster the use of resources and expressive arts in living with loss. We ask that you and/or your organization identify a way to help your friends, neighbors and patrons learn more about grieving and its expression. We envision involvement of communities statewide in many simple and creative efforts. The Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium wants to support you and your organization by providing a press release and using our website to inform an audience of planned activities.
Please join us in helping the many Delawareans who have experienced grief after the death of someone they love. November is the time to share your creativity and your organization’s interest to raise public awareness of the grief process and its expression. In 2009, Governor Markell proclaimed the first full week in November every year as Grief Awareness Week, “a time set aside for grief awareness to enhance solidarity with our human mortality and our common need for mourning and healing. It is a time to remind all Delawareans of the far-reaching universality of grief in the lives of family members, friends and colleagues. While grief is a natural and healthy coping response to death and tragedy, it is often misunderstood, unrecognized, unacknowledged and unsupported. Learning leads to a more supportive and healing environment for those who are in mourning.”
In 2012 our statewide initiative during Grief Awareness Week overflowed with activities throughout the month! This year, the Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium invites and urges you to plan, provide and participate in community and educational events throughout the entire month of November 2013.
We will assist you….What can you do?
- Think about any opportunity to talk to your friends, students, co-workers, congregation about personal losses or public tragedies. Explore feelings and ways of coping with loss. Use a copy of the Governor’s Proclamation of Grief Awareness Week to start the conversation.
- Make a brief lesson plan about grief and loss appropriate to your audience. Get children and adults thinking, sharing, listening, learning, drawing, writing, and even dancing.
- Consider featuring a selected piece of art in your gallery, museum, or webpage that symbolizes a story of love, loss and grief; or exhibit works created by people who have expressed grief through various art forms.
- Discuss or display books from writers who may enlighten us about their grief-journey. Listen to, read or write poetry. Share helpful music with a friend is who is grieving.
- Plan activities in nature such as memory walks or planting a tree as a tribute to your loved one.
- Lace up those walking/running shoes and support causes and non-profit organizations that are dedicated to curing disease or supporting those who grieve.
Now is the time to contact us at the DEGAC website www.degac.org . We will follow up with you and direct participants to your planned events.
With thanks,
Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium Steering Committee