Press and media

Who we are

About the board

The Board Certified Grief Coach (BCGC) credential is awarded to practitioners who are measured against the published standard through education review, verified practice hours, an ethics attestation, and a proctored Board Examination. The standard is free, public, and citeable. Anyone may read it, reference it, or write it into their own referral criteria at no cost.

INBGC does not provide foundational grief coach training. Candidates obtain that education elsewhere, from any qualified provider, and Program Administration reviews it against six published topic areas. The Advisory Board sets and owns the standard and does not review individual candidate files. Nobody with a commercial interest in candidate flow helps define the bar.

INBGC is not accredited by an outside body and does not pursue outside accreditation. It publishes the standard in full instead.

INBGC operates as a trade name of Meridian Credentialing LLC, Westerville, Ohio. The published standard is at inbgc.org/standards/.

The angle

The story behind the credential

This matters because of who is buying. A grieving person selects who to trust at the moment their judgment is least reliable, and they have no way to check the answers they are given. Good training and no training look identical from the outside.

The same gap affects the professionals who refer them. Hospices, funeral homes, chaplaincy networks, employee assistance programs, therapist networks, and senior living operators all refer grieving people to grief coaches, and most have no defensible criteria for choosing. The common result is not that families are sent to poorly prepared coaches. It is that the category gets left off the referral list entirely, and the person who wanted one-to-one non-clinical support receives nothing.

INBGC exists at that verification point. The board publishes the criteria, measures practitioners against them, and maintains a registry that confirms standing by credential number.

Quick reference

Facts a story may need

Every item below is published on the site and can be checked against the standard.

• Grief coaching is not licensed or regulated in the United States. No training is required to use the title.
• The credential requires education reviewed against six published topic areas, accepted from any qualified provider.
• A minimum of 50 verified practice hours, documented through a signed professional attestation plus one supporting record. No client session is ever recorded and no client is ever contacted.
• A proctored Board Examination requiring 80 percent across six equally weighted topic areas, with a criterion-referenced passing standard set by the Advisory Board.
• The credential is maintained rather than permanent: annual renewal plus 30 hours of continuing education across a rolling three-year cycle.
• Standing is verifiable by credential number, returning Active, Expired, or Revoked. Verification is free and does not involve the coach.
• Grief coaching under the standard is non-clinical. It does not diagnose, treat, prescribe, provide psychotherapy, or serve as crisis intervention, and the published scope names when a coach must refer to licensed or emergency care.
• Grief under the standard covers loss of every kind, including divorce, job loss, serious illness, estrangement, identity change, and career transition, not death alone.
• Referral partners are never charged for anything, and the published standard is free to read, cite, and adopt.

Source documents: the certification standards, the Code of Ethics and Scope of Practice, governance and accountability, and the referral criteria for grief coaching.

Interview subjects

What INBGC can speak to

Scope

What INBGC declines

The board does not offer clinical guidance, does not provide advice on managing personal grief, and does not comment on individual practitioners, training programs, or other certifying organizations by name. Where a story needs a clinical voice, Program Administration will say so rather than supply one.

Requests for seasonal or holiday grief tips are declined. Program Administration will redirect those requests toward the verification angle, or suggest a licensed clinician better suited to the segment.

Interviews

Spokesperson

Rita Suzanne

Executive Director

Available for interview by video or telephone.

[email protected]

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Rita Suzanne leads Program Administration at INBGC, the function that applies the published standard to individual candidates and organizations. She is accountable for application intake, eligibility review, education review, examination administration, credentialing, and the operation of the registry.

She speaks as a credentialing board administrator on standards, verification, governance, and consumer protection in an unregulated field. She does not speak as a grief expert or a clinician, and the Advisory Board rather than the Executive Director owns the content of the standard.

For interview requests, note your deadline in the subject line and it will be prioritized. Background conversations that are not for attribution are welcome.

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Accuracy

Correcting the record

If coverage misstates what the BCGC credential requires, what INBGC certifies, or the standing of a specific practitioner, write to [email protected] and Program Administration will provide the published source. Every requirement described on this page is published on the site and can be checked directly.