Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition Inaugural Host Cohort

A joint initiative of the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal project and The Dinner Party

August 17 and 18, 2022

10:00 am – 2:00 pm PT / 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm ET

This event has passed and registration is closed.

Become A Life After Loss Table (LALT) Host!

Learn how to hold space for educators to connect and share about what it means to teach, lead school sites or systems, and provide school services after the death of a student or alum.

Interested in holding space for grief and the grief of others?

We’re looking for educators who’ve lost a student to join us in an inaugural effort to break down the silences and stigmas attached to grief in schools as educators, and to create spaces where we can explore how the experience has shaped us and the work we do.

Join our inaugural host cohort

We’re looking for educators who want to host a group in your own community or school, and invite you to join us for a two-day training on how to hold space for grieving peers, as part of an inaugural cohort of hosts.

During the training, participants will learn how to organize a group, and the ins and outs of holding space: from how to structure each gathering, to how to care for yourself and others, to what to do when things go awry. You’ll have a chance to experience a table firsthand, and to share and reflect on your own experiences of loss and life after.

From there, you [our cohort members] will be able to set up tables in your own communities, receiving quarterly check-ins, 1:1 mentorship from SCRR staff, and ongoing support as you host their tables.

What Is This and Why This

Over the last six months, the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project partnered with The Dinner Party (more info below) to pilot “Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition.” Participants ranged from first-year teachers to retired special educators, school counselors, and youth advocates, all bound by having lost a student, whether recently or years before. These recurring virtual gatherings (“tables”) are intentional, peer-led spaces for educators to engage in conversation around their experience with death-related, school-based losses as a means towards healing.

At tables, we explored these essential questions:

How might the experience of student death years ago impact your current practice?
How might we make sense of school-based loss and how that informs who we are as administrators, educators, clinicians, and youth advocates?
How might we incorporate the losses we experienced as students ourselves, now that we are educators-perhaps even in the same community in which we grew up?

The feedback we got was consistent, and the results were powerful: Educators who’d felt alone suddenly had a community of peers, and permission to open up about a subject that’s talked about in hushed tones, if it’s talked about at all.

We believe that healing is collective, that moving forward is not the same as moving on, and that our most honest and revelatory conversations happen not in school board or faculty meetings, but in spaces that feel familiar, with people who’ve been there, too.

These last months and years have seen no shortage of individual and collective grief, and educators have borne an enormous share. We invite you to join us as we lift up the curtain on loss and its impact, and how it informs who we are as administrators, educators, clinicians, and youth advocates.

How will it go?

August 2022: Inaugural cohort training
September – October 2022: Launch tables in your spaces and places!
November 2022: Pre-holidays check-in with hosts (date and time TBD)
January 2023: Follow up training (to start quarterly in 2023)
January 2023: Potential In-person training in SF/Bay Area!
Ongoing: 1:1 coaching and support from your SCRR team

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What do you mean by “educator”? We define “educators” as anyone tending to the well-being of students in school based settings, serving and supporting school-aged youth. You might be an afterschool service provider, a state, district, or county school administrator, a school-based clinician, a principal, a teacher, a bus driver, a coach, or a professor or someone working in advocacy who used to teach K-12. Whatever your present-day role, you, too, are welcome here.
What do you mean by student loss”? We define “student” as a young person you knew or had a relationship with in any capacity, at any time. The student may have died years after they left school, and you may have been out of touch by the time of their death: the impact remains no less real. And they may have died from any cause: a car accident, illness, suicide, overdose, or violence.
I’ve lost a student, but I don’t really identify as grieving. Is this right for me? You do not need to identify as a “griever”: In fact, many of us struggle with the word, whether that’s because we were never afforded the “right” and the space to grieve, or because the death happened years or even decades ago, and we’ve long since found ways to move forward, even as we continue to be colored by the experience in ways big and small.
Is this a grief support group, or a form of therapy? No. These gatherings may be therapeutic, but they’re not therapy. We’re not interested in professionalizing anything, but in humanizing everything. If you yourself are a counselor or school-based social worker, remember that this is a chance to take off that hat for 90 minutes and to show up as peers, not professionals.
Did I need to participate in the pilot in order to participate in the training? Nope.
What’s the commitment? We’re looking for educators who can host a table within the coming school year (September 2022-June 2023). We expect most groups will get together every month or two, but some groups may choose to gather quarterly: Your choice!
Is this in-person or virtual? The training will take place virtually, but each table is welcome to gather in-person or virtually, depending on the group’s preference.
Can I have a co-host? Yes! You can sign up for the training with a colleague, or you can ask SCRR to co-facilitate with you. And who knows: You may meet someone at the training who wants to team up as a co-host with you!

Faculty

Mary Horn (she/hers)

Director of Community Experience at The Dinner Party

Mary is passionate about creating strong community infrastructure and support systems that serve people well. After losing her mom in 2015 and Dinner Party-ing her way through grief in the years that followed, Mary joined The Dinner Party staff in 2019. She started at TDP as a Regional Fellow, matching Tables in the Northeast, before pivoting to build and manage TDP’s Virtual Table program when COVID hit in 2020. Today, Mary runs the Community Experience Team for the organization. Before her grief-inspired career pivot, Mary worked in Academic Editorial at Oxford University Press and completed her doctorate in Music History at Yale University. After growing up in Boulder, CO, Mary now makes the most of the outdoors in and around Brooklyn, you’re likely to find her baking sourdough or hiking with her happy dog, Lucy.

Lennon Flowers (she/hers)

Co-founder and Executive Director at The Dinner Party.

Lennon Flowers is hell-bent on creating spaces where humans can be human, out of a belief that nothing is done in isolation, and that self-help only works in community. She’s the co-founder & Executive Director of The Dinner Party, a community of mostly 20-, 30-, and early 40-somethings working to transform our most isolating experiences into sources of meaningful connection and forward movement. Since 2014, The Dinner Party has connected more than 13,000 grieving peers to one another, including 3,600 since the start of the pandemic. She’s the co-founder of The People’s Supper, which uses shared meals to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Its work is born of the popular adage that change moves at the speed of trust, and a simple question: What needs healing here? Since 2017, The People’s Supper has brought more than 10,000 people together for suppers in more than 100 cities and towns across the country, in partnership with dozens of local government & civic groups, faith-based organizations and communities, colleges & universities, and workplaces. She is an Ashoka Fellow and Encore Gen2Gen Innovation Fellow, and her work has been featured on OnBeing with Krista Tippett, NPR’s Morning Edition, CNN, CBS This Morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other publications.

Leora Wolf-Prusan (she/hers), EdD

Project Director of the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project

Leora Wolf-Prusan serves as the Project Director for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project and as the School Mental Health field director for the Pacific Southwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC), in addition to many other facilitation projects. Previous roles include a national field director of a SAMHSA initiative (ReCAST) and technical assistance for the Student Mental Health Program for California’s Community Colleges, CalWORKs, and more. With years of training and facilitating learning and community building in schools p-16, Wolf-Prusan is skilled in facilitation, human learning design, training, and coaching. Wolf-Prusan is dedicated to work focused on educator mental health, wellness, and trauma-informed approaches to education and operates through a framework in which public health, social work, and education intersect. Her research examined the impact of student death on teachers, what factors contribute to teachers building resiliency, and what supports teachers need from the school system in the event of a student homicide or other traumas. She received a BA in international relations and a BA in Spanish with a minor in Social & Ethnic Relations from the University of California, Davis; a teaching credential from Mills College; and an EdD in educational leadership from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work in school crisis recovery and renewal is motivated by and dedicated to educators and youth who envision schools as a platform for community and connection.

Oriana Ides (she/hers), MA, LPCCI, PPS

Field Coach for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project

Oriana Ides is the School Mental Health Training Specialist at CARS, who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life course from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.

Alica Foreneret (she/hers)

SCRR Product Manager

Alica is an educator, speaker, and consultant dedicated to creating new spaces for people to explore grief and grieving. We are grateful to be guided by community leaders, scholars, researchers, and thought leaders across the country who have dedicated work not only to school crisis readiness and response, but also recovery and renewal. Alica facilitates for teams at organizations including Google, Culture Amp, Nielsen, and The California Department of Education. She has partnered with the likes of The Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation, Columbia University, and Lululemon. And she consults on product development and systems change to help companies create resources and tools for grieving communities. Alica’s writing about grief, work, and race have been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today, Huffington Post, GQ, and more. Alica is the founding Lab Director of the “Starlight End of Life Lab”, Program Lead for School Crisis Recovery & Renewal’s “Pedagogy of Grief” project, an associate board member for Our House, and an inaugural member of the BC Women’s Health Foundation Young Women’s Council.