Project Description:
The Boggs Center has received increasing numbers of requests to assist staff and consumers in group homes, residential programs, and day programs in coping with the losses and deaths in the lives of consumers, families, and staff. Provider agencies have frequently not developed relationships with local clergy or other bereavement resources to assist staff in dealing with the feelings of consumers and with their own, and strategies for addressing grief in a proactive manner. Through this project, The Boggs Center is sponsoring one day training workshops on coping with loss and grief, developing customized workshops as requested by individual agencies, and providing individual technical assistance to agencies as they address issues of grief and loss in the agency. The Boggs Center also collects and disseminates resources on grief and loss developed for people with developmental disabilities and their families.Preservice trainees in our Clinical Pastoral Education program and in field education programs through area seminaries have also utilized these resources and provided both training and technical assistance in agencies where they are placed. The expected benefits are that individual situations and supports can be developed, but also that agencies and staff will develop skills and strategies to plan for, and address, future times of loss, grief, and death in lives of the consumers they support and their families
Keyword(s):
aging, grief, loss, death
Core Function(s):
Training Trainees, Performing Technical Assistance and/or Training, Developing & Disseminating Information
Target Audience:
Professionals and Para-Professionals, Family Members/Caregivers
Unserved or Under-served Populations:
Racial or Ethnic Minorities, Specific Groups
Primary Target Audience Geographic Descriptor:
Single-County, Mulit-County
COVID-19 Related Data:
N/A
