Governance
Governance and accountability
The Independent National Board for Grief Coaching keeps three functions apart: setting the standard, applying it, and referencing it. This page sets out who does each, and what happens when a certificant does not meet the standard.
How independence is structured
Three functions are kept apart, and no person or group does more than one. The Advisory Board sets the standard. Program Administration applies it to individual candidates and organizations. Referral partners reference it and are never charged for anything.
Independence is a structure rather than a claim. The people who decide what a Board Certified Grief Coach must know are not the people who decide whether a particular candidate met that bar, and neither group has a financial interest in how many candidates come through. Nobody with a commercial interest in candidate flow helps define the bar.
INBGC provides no foundational grief coach training at any price. Every candidate brings grief-specific education from an outside provider and has it reviewed against the six topic areas, so the board holds no stake in where any candidate studied and no reason to favor one provider over another.
INBGC is not accredited by an outside body and does not pursue outside accreditation. Rather than rely on a mark, the board publishes the standard in full. The six topic areas, the scope of practice, the Code of Ethics, the continuing education requirements, and the passing threshold are all public. Read them and judge the credential against them directly.
Setting the standard
The Advisory Board defines what candidates are measured against. It does not open candidate files.
Applying the standard
Program Administration reviews education, verifies practice, administers examinations, and issues credentials. It does not write the rules it enforces.
Referencing the standard
Referral partners use the standard and the credential to decide where to send grieving people. They never set the standard and are never charged.
The Advisory Board
The Advisory Board holds professional authority for the Board Certified Grief Coach credential. It decides what a coach must know, where the bar sits, where the work ends, what certificants are held to, and what counts as qualifying education. It does not review individual candidate files.
Members serve two-year renewable terms and are drawn from the disciplines grief work touches: grief and bereavement, clinical mental health, hospice and palliative care, chaplaincy and spiritual care, and coaching standards and ethics.
Advisory Board members may not hold a commercial interest in candidate flow. Combined with the separation between setting and applying, that condition is what allows the standard to belong to the profession rather than to whoever runs the office.
Program Administration
Program Administration is where the standard meets the individual candidate or organization. Everything it does is execution of rules set elsewhere.
Program Administration is the operational function of the credential, led by the Executive Director. It applies the published standard consistently to every candidate and every education provider, and it has no authority to change what that standard requires.
What Program Administration does
- Application intake and eligibility review
- Education review against the six topic areas
- Board Examination and Endorsement Examination administration, including proctoring coordination
- Verified practice hours review
- Credential issuance and registry management
- Renewals and continuing education tracking
- Records
- Education provider recognition review against the published criteria
- Ethics complaint intake, confidential review, and enforcement of the published outcomes
- Administration of the appeals process
What Program Administration does not do
- Define the rules it enforces
- Set examination content, passing thresholds, ethics requirements, or continuing education requirements
- Waive a requirement for an individual candidate
Executive Director
Rita Suzanne
Rita Suzanne leads Program Administration and is accountable for INBGC operating the way it says it does. She runs application intake, education review, examination administration, verified practice review, credentialing, renewals, and education provider recognition, applying the standard the Advisory Board sets. Where the standard is silent or ambiguous, she brings the question to the Advisory Board rather than resolving it inside the office.
Her professional background is business operations, growth, and marketing. She ran her own boutique marketing agency for more than a decade, serving coaches and local business owners, and no longer takes marketing clients. INBGC is her full-time work.
Ten years alongside the coaching industry showed her the same problem from both sides. A coach who trained seriously, practices within a defined scope, and knows when to refer has no way to prove any of it to a stranger, so the clients go to whoever markets hardest. A grieving family has no way to tell the difference, and often does not know there is a difference to look for. A certificate settles nothing, because it can be issued by anyone, after any amount of instruction, usually by the same organization that sold the training.
INBGC does not teach grief coaching. It tests whether a coach is prepared to support grieving people, against a standard set by professionals who practice in the field, and it is independent of whoever provided the training. That gives a coach something to point to, a grieving family something to check, and the hospice coordinator or clergy member making the referral something to reference before sending someone in distress to a stranger.
She represents the board publicly and answers questions about the standard, how it is set, and how an institution can reference it in its own referral criteria.
Conflict rules, by function
Each group that touches INBGC has one defined relationship to the standard, and a published rule that keeps it there.
Advisory Board members
May not hold a commercial interest in candidate flow. They set the standard and do not review individual candidates.
Recognized Education Providers
Pay for the review of their curriculum against the published criteria, never for the outcome. They do not set the criteria they are reviewed against, do not sit on the Advisory Board, and receive no advantage in any individual candidate's review beyond the speed gained from a curriculum that has already been reviewed.
Listed resources
Tools and services listed in the professional resource directory pay a flat fee for a listing, not an endorsement. Listings are disclosed as paid, carry no ranking or ordering by payment, and never appear in any resource aimed at a grieving member of the public.
Podcast sponsors
May not be entities INBGC evaluates, which excludes Recognized Education Providers, applicants in the recognition pipeline, continuing education providers, and certificants. Sponsorship is disclosed at the top of the episode and in the show notes, and never influences guest selection or content.
Referral partners
Reference the standard and are never charged for anything. They do not set the standard, do not sit on the Advisory Board, and do not influence individual certification decisions.
What INBGC charges for
INBGC earns from measuring people against the standard, from reviewing organizations against published criteria, and from listing professional tools and services. The standard itself is free and public, permanently.
The test applied to every source of revenue is one question: does the money touch a judgment INBGC publishes? The board states that a candidate met the standard, that a provider's curriculum meets the criteria, and that a certificant is in good standing. Those statements are the entire value of the organization, and none of them is for sale.
What INBGC charges for
- Certification fees, renewal, Board Examination retakes, additional Practice Exam attempts, and Endorsement Examination fees
- Specialty education inside the Specialty Path, which is optional, priced separately from the Endorsement Examination, and accepted from any other provider on equal terms
- Review of education providers and continuing education providers against the published criteria
- Flat-fee listings in the professional resource directory
- Flat-fee sponsorship of the podcast
What INBGC does not charge for
- Referral partners, for anything
- Access to the published standard, which is free to read, cite, or write into a referral policy at no cost
- Practice resources for certificants, which are free to every certificant
How provider fees stay compatible with independence
Four conditions hold, and they are published because they are the answer.
- Recognition is a shortcut, never a gate. A candidate whose education came from a provider that never applied still certifies on the merits.
- The fee buys the review, not the outcome. Providers that do not meet the published criteria are not recognized, and the fee is not refunded.
- Recognition is revocable, and there is a published route for a candidate to report a provider whose training did not match what was reviewed.
- No fee varies with candidate volume, in either direction.
INBGC accepts no affiliate or revenue-share arrangements in any context. Flat fees only.
Complaints, review, and revocation
Every certificant agrees to be held to the Code of Ethics for as long as they hold the credential. Complaints are received by Program Administration, reviewed confidentially, and resolved through published outcomes.
A credential that cannot be lost describes the year a coach finished a course. The Board Certified Grief Coach credential is maintained rather than owned, and it answers to the standard continuously.
How a complaint is handled
Intake
Anyone may raise a concern about a certificant's conduct, including a client, a referral partner, an employer, or another certificant. Complaints go to [email protected].
Confidential review
Program Administration reviews the complaint against the published Code of Ethics and Scope of Practice. Review is confidential to protect everyone involved.
Outcome
Where a violation is found, the published outcomes are guidance, warning, probation, suspension, or revocation, applied according to the seriousness of the conduct.
Appeal
A certificant may appeal a decision through the published appeals process.
The Advisory Board sets the ethics standard a complaint is measured against. It does not review individual complaints, and it does not decide any individual certificant's status.
A revoked credential may not be displayed, and the designation may not be used.
Contact
Questions about governance
The standard, the eligibility requirements, the topic areas, the Code of Ethics, the scope of practice, and the passing threshold are published in full. Institutions building referral criteria are welcome to cite any of it at no cost.
Questions about governance, the standard, or how to reference it in a referral policy go to [email protected].