Image: Winter by Agnes Pelton
a community of practice for Grief Workers + Facilitators birthing new worlds in troubled times 🕸️
The work of moving through despair, and creating space for grief, joy, embodiment, empowerment, and connection is a growing collective need.
Facilitation and grief tending are skills that belong to all of us, and more and more of us will need them to be able to live and die well together in troubled times.
Easing the Passage is 6 month course for community grief workers and facilitators looking to do this work with the joy, tenderness, rootedness, and tenacity these times call for.
Beginner's welcome!
Upcoming Course Dates
May - October 2026
enrolling through may 2nd
Course Cost: $1500
This class might be for you if…
✨ You are passionate about birthing worlds in which grief is held as sacred and welcomed
✨ You believe we need a diversity of spaces and ways to be together in grief
✨ You see grief tending as political, countercultural, and life-giving (even joyous) work
✨ You feel called to hold space for grief in your community, but want more tools, structure, & support to do it well
✨ You want to develop a facilitation practice rooted in your gifts — not a one-size-fits-all method
✨ You want to hone your skills and craft as a facilitator so that you feel confident & rooted in your work
✨ You want to build sustainable rhythms in your grief tending practice rather ones that leave you burnt out
✨ You want to sustain yourself as a tender of grief spaces (emotionally, logistically, financially)
✨ You're excited to learn & grow alongside a cohort of fellow grief workers & community care practitioners
✨ You value the wisdom & insight that arises in an intentional community of study & practice
Please note: I am not a licensed therapist or grief counselor. This class is not a clinical therapy training, nor is it a substitute for professional mental health care, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are seeking therapy, treatment, or crisis support, please seek the care of a licensed professional.
Facilitators as Collective Doulas
Image by Naya Kotko
Doulas serve those as the thresholds, making transformations, life, and death more easeful and empowered experiences.
At it's root, to facilitate means to make easeful.
As facilitators of group spaces in precarious, transformative, grief filled times, we work to doula the collective.
Course Topics
Click on the headings below for a list of subtopics!
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Facilitation 101: What it is and why it’s needed
Overlaps in facilitation, care work, and community organizing work
Facilitation for Collective Agency & Remembering ourselves as multitudes
Skills of effective facilitators
Facilitating spaces for grief: from rituals to support groups and other processes
Facilitating community spaces where grief is present, but not the focus
Facilitation as a Collective Skill: Against Professionalization & Towards Proliferation of Facilitators
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Community Grief and Death Work: What is it?
Grief as Holy Disruptor: Grief work as political work
Grief Tending as Culture Building
Grieving under Capitalism: Against the repression & co-optation of fear, loss, grief, and trauma
Towards Worlds of Many Worlds: The need for a diversity of grief tending spaces, approaches, and practices
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Identifying your whys, your values, your joys, your skills, and communities you might (or already) work with
Filling your cup, finding your ecosystem: Getting clear on the practices, mentors, relationships, & systems that will support you in this work
Setting boundaries and clear expectations for the scope of your work
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A short history of capitalism, industrialization of death care, and context for un/paid care work
Examining “Money Mindset”, Capitalist Ideologies, Neoliberalism, and orientations towards accepting pay and exchange for community care work
Demystifying LLCs, taxes, bookkeeping, budgeting, and financial literacy related to working for yourself
Is it possible to burn it all down AND pay the bills? Finding alignment in the mess of living and working under capitalism
Pricing structures and livelihood models that create access AND sustainability
Investing in community over capitalism
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Practicing, reflecting on, and strategizing approaches to facilitation
Developing & workshopping offerings with cohort feedback
Communicating about your offerings and the work you do
Identifying next steps, approaches, boundaries, and practices that make this work sustainable for you
Please note: this is the pilot of this course so this is a draft of things we might explore! Participants will shape this course by sharing what topics are most relevant to them. Our course will also be largely experiential, collaborative, and participatory, rather than a lecture-style course.
This course is designed to actively support you doing the work you want to do.
A mixed levels class - Beginners welcome 💗
This is a mixed levels class- meaning that this is a space for those at various levels of experience with facilitation and grief work - whether beginners or those who have been at it for a while!
Course structure + SCHEDULE
Our class will meet 3x-4x per month for May - October of 2026.
There are 2 cohorts:
Cohort 1 - Wednesdays, 12-2pm eastern time
Cohort 2 - Wednesdays, 6-8pm eastern time
There will be a handful of sessions with guest instructors that will fall outside of these times.
All sessions will be recorded for those unable to make it live!
Easing the Passage members will also get discounted 1-1 mentorship sessions with me, which you can schedule anytime you like!
Instructors & Facilitators
mara june
primary instructor + Facilitator
Mara June is (they/them) is an educator, facilitator, community weaver, writer, caregiver, death doula, and community herbalist. They’re excited about plant magic, story-telling, art + ritual making, shapeshifting, and dreaming together.
Mara’s death care and grief support work is community oriented, taking place in longer term, group settings to feed the collective work of growing more deeply attuned and resourced communities who love, care, dream, and create courageously in times of loss, change, and grief.
To learn more about my trainings, approaches, and background, check out my about me page.
Camille Sapara Barton
Guest instructor
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment facilitator and movement artist that supports organisations to flow through transitions. Their work creates relational wellbeing by increasing connection to the body, care practices, grief and imagination. Camille supports people to reduce stress and increase resilience, while navigating change. They also offer trauma informed facilitation and consultancy to support cultural workers, funders and those working with socially engaged topics.
Camille’s movement practice explores the interplay between bodies, words and vibration by weaving dance, clowning, somatics and sonics. Their work aims to deepen ancestral communication technologies and grow imagination gardens.
Camille is the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024). Based in Amsterdam, they designed and directed MA Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023) which explored how embodiment and socially engaged art making can create change through the body, into the wider world.
naila francis
Guest instructor
Naila Francis is a certified grief coach and death midwife, an interfaith minister and a writer/poet. As the founder of This Hallowed Wilderness, she helps people transform their relationship to grief and loss through holistic, heart-centered individual support, workshops, community grief tending and rituals. Her work is often informed by her love of poetry, nature and community. She is also a co-founder of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective normalizing and holding space for grief through community rituals. An ardent joy enthusiast, Naila believes in grieving well as a liberatory practice that deepens our capacity for pleasure, connection and compassion.
Additional guests TBA
Cost
1 payment of $1500, 4 payments of $375, or 10 payments of $150
Payment plans can be selected on the registration pages below!
Please choose a cohort time that works best for your schedule- as this will be your cohort for the full 6 months! All sessions are also recorded if neither time works for you live, in which case sign up for either!💗
Scholarships
Scholarships are available for BIPOC and low income students. If interested, please complete an interest form. Don’t be shy!