FOUNDER'S PAGE
Why this board was created
The Independent National Board for Grief Coaching began with a question its founder could not answer for herself: when someone is grieving and goes looking for help, how do they know the person offering it is actually trained to give it?
A gap experienced firsthand
INBGC was founded by Rita Coleman, a business and systems strategist with more than a decade of experience helping professionals build clear standards and durable, trustworthy organizations. But the board did not come from strategy. It came from grief.
After years of significant loss and the long work of rebuilding through difficult seasons, Rita understood from the inside how much the right support matters — and how inconsistent that support can be. She worked with therapists, counselors, and other helping professionals along the way.
Many were credentialed and well-intentioned, yet the help that existed was not always built for what grief specifically required. The need was real, and the support meant to meet it was uneven.
At one point she considered grief-specific support for herself. She did not pursue it — not because she doubted that grief coaching could help, but because she found no reliable standard for judging who was trained, accountable, and practicing within clear boundaries. There were many people using the title. There was nothing shared behind it.
Faced with a season where she most needed help, she had no way to tell a qualified professional from someone who had simply claimed the words 'grief coach.' So she set the option aside.
The problem was the missing standard
That experience revealed the gap clearly. The issue was not a shortage of caring people entering grief work — it was the absence of any independent way to know who was qualified. For a grieving person or family, that uncertainty is not a small inconvenience.
It is the difference between reaching for help and giving up on it, often at the worst possible moment to be guessing.
It also does a disservice to the many grief coaches who are genuinely trained and committed. Without a recognized standard, the credible practitioner and the casual one look identical from the outside. The good ones lose trust they have earned, simply because there is nothing to distinguish them.
Building the standard she could not find
INBGC is the answer to that gap — built deliberately as an independent board rather than another personality-led brand or training program.
The goal was never to make any one person the face of grief expertise. It was to create a structure that makes a coach's qualifications knowable: published standards, examination, verified practice hours, ethics, and renewal.
So no one has to guess
INBGC exists so that a grieving person never has to face the uncertainty its founder did — trying to judge, alone and at their most vulnerable, whether the help in front of them is real. A clear standard protects the people who are grieving, and it gives the coaches who serve them a credential worth earning.
This board is the answer I wished existed when I was looking for help. I built it for others.
Rita Coleman, INBGC Founder
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