Podcast
Grief Support in Practice
Conversations for professionals whose work meets grief. Published by the Independent National Board for Grief Coaching.
Grief Support in Practice is a professional conversation about work that most people never see, published by the board that maintains the standard for non-clinical grief coaching.
The show
What Grief Support in Practice is
Conversations for professionals whose work meets grief. Hospice and palliative teams, funeral professionals, chaplains and clergy, therapists, and the people running bereavement and employee support programs.
Almost everything published about grief is written for grieving people. Very little is written for the professionals who meet them.
The bereavement coordinator deciding where to send a family. The chaplain who is the only person in the building trained for this. The funeral director whose aftercare ends the week the service does. The human resources director with no idea what to do when an employee's spouse dies.
These are the people grieving families actually encounter, and nobody is talking to them.
This show is that conversation. It covers what the work involves, where the gaps are, and how the professionals doing it think about scope, referral, and the limits of their own role.
The reason
Why this conversation is missing
INBGC publishes the professional standard for non-clinical grief coaching. Underneath that standard sits a question the board cannot answer alone: how does a person in grief end up with someone competent in front of them, and who is responsible for making that happen.
That question belongs to a much wider group than grief coaches. It belongs to hospice, to funeral service, to chaplaincy, to clinical care, and to employers. Those disciplines rarely talk to each other about it, and people fall through the gaps between them.
Convening that conversation is work a standards body should be doing. The show is not a marketing channel for the credential, and guests are not asked to endorse it or discuss it.
The show accepts flat-fee sponsorship, disclosed at the top of the episode and in the show notes. Sponsorship never influences guest selection, topics, or content, and sponsors are never drawn from the categories INBGC evaluates, which excludes education providers, continuing education providers, and certificants. No payment changes hands with guests in either direction. See how the board is governed.
Subject matter
What episodes cover
Practice rather than theory, and the questions professionals rarely get asked in public.
- What the work actually involves, including the parts that appear in no job description.
- How professionals decide where to send someone, and what they wish they had when the answer is not obvious.
- Where a scope ends, how that gets recognized in the moment, and what happens next.
- Grief that goes unrecognized, including non-death loss, disenfranchised grief, and losses nobody around a person names as grief at all.
- Where the system fails, particularly the spaces between disciplines where people are handed off and lost.
- Carrying this work over a career, and what sustains the people who do it.
The show does not give advice to grieving people, and it is not a substitute for clinical care. It is a professional conversation about professional practice.
Guests
Who you hear from
Practitioners and program leaders rather than personalities. People whose daily work brings them into contact with grieving people, or who are responsible for a program that does.
Hospice and palliative care
Bereavement coordinators, social workers, program directors, and clinicians working with families before and after a death.
Funeral and death care
Funeral directors, aftercare coordinators, and memorial professionals who meet families at the moment of loss.
Chaplaincy and clergy
Hospital and hospice chaplains, pastoral caregivers, and faith leaders carrying grief work alongside everything else.
Clinical mental health
Therapists, counselors, and psychologists working with bereavement, prolonged grief, and loss of every kind.
Employers and employee support
Human resources leaders and employee assistance program directors handling bereavement policy and workplace loss.
Researchers and educators
Thanatologists, academics, and educators whose work shapes how the field understands grief and trains for it.
Adjacent fields belong here too. Senior living, home health, family law, financial and estate professionals, veterinary medicine, and disaster response all meet grief regularly and are almost never asked about it.
Listening
Where the show publishes
Episodes publish as audio through Buzzsprout, carried to the major podcast apps, and as video on YouTube.
Every episode is published here with a full written transcript. Transcripts exist because this is reference material for working professionals, and a bereavement coordinator looking for what a colleague said about referral thresholds should be able to find it and read it rather than scrub through audio.
Questions about the show go to [email protected].
Take part
Be a guest
If your work regularly meets grieving people, the show exists to hear from you. Guests speak about their own practice, not about grief coaching and not about board certification. A few sentences about what you do is enough to start.
Recommending a colleague is equally welcome. The best guests are usually named by someone else rather than by themselves.
Common questions
The standard behind the show
If you refer grieving people to someone
The professional standard this board maintains is published in full and free to reference. If your organization sends people to grief support and has no defensible criteria for choosing who, that is the page to start with.