Leading Grief Groups with System Involved Youth in Person or Virtually

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

Leading grief groups can be a daunting task. Choosing to take this task on with system involved youth comes with its own challenges. How a child understands the losses that have experienced due to death, moving homes, schools and family members require us to provide additional and more creative supports for assisting them in managing and creating a container for those multiple losses. For those used to delivering grief support in person, virtual meetings have necessitated new approaches for engaging system involved youth in grief support activities, developing rapport, and utilizing nonverbal cues. This session will teach training participants how to include these youth’s needs, with a particular focus on strategies and techniques for facilitating groups either online or in person.

Learning Objectives

During this session, participants will:

● Learn how to identify and leverage the personal strengths and capabilities of each youth participating in a grief group and those supporting them in their support system/s to get the most benefit from group grief work

● Develop strategies for recognizing the shared and dissimilar losses in a group of potential grief group members to support efforts to choose the best blending of experiences, ages and known coping strategies.

● Explore ways to use activities, in person materials and Zoom features and functions to promote engagement in group discussions, build rapport, and lead groups through grief activities

Agenda 

10:00am-10:45am  Instructor and Group introduces selves and discuss philosophies of grief as well as positive and negative experiences with engaging system involved youth with the topic of grief

10:45 – 11:30am  Teaching: Learn to identify and recognize your fears, concerns, and positive skill sets in group facilitation. Review instructor’s outline for creating the structure for a group including how to design a multi session theme, identify potential participants for group parity, ascertain participants developmental capacity to access their grief needs, and devise reachable goals.

11:30-12:00pm  Group activity: Using handout provided, we will follow the prompts and discuss a planning outline for running your grief group. Identify the unique needs of your system involved youth population, and brainstorm ways to manage your fears areas of concern and support needs.

12:00-12:30pm  Lunch Break (No CEUs will be offered for this time)

12:30-1:30pm  Teaching: Running the group itself. Designing group agreements and goals. Presentation of multiple activities. Techniques for getting buy-in from system involved youth to each activity. Managing difficult behaviors

1:30-2:45pm  Questions & Answers: Any specific needs of youth in your care that have not been otherwise addressed

2:45-3:15pm  Final questions, reflections and group appreciations ritual and course Evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

This course meets the qualifications for (4.75) BBS CEUs for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.