Bereavement supports in inner-city communities

Grief supports are necessary to help children process death, without hindering their ability to engage with the world around them from a place of safety, purpose and worthiness. There are unique considerations in providing bereavement services to inner city youth who may be regularly exposed to drug use, while also experiencing higher rates of mortality related to injury, gun violence, intimate partner violence, suicide and poorly controlled non-communicable disease. Many newcomer or refugee families also find themselves in inner-city neighbourhoods due to housing availability and often carry with them unprocessed trauma from previous experiences of conflict or war.
Our project aims to provide grief resources and workshops that address barriers to accessing bereavement supports, such as the lack of culturally responsive services in racialized neighbourhoods; community distrust of historically oppressive institutions associated with recurrent experiences of being discriminated against; and the complexity of coping with substance use or homicide-related grief that carries with it blame, shame and explicit social stigma. Our goal is host workshops to explore creative modalities to process grief, catered to various developmental stages and communication skills; equip parents to navigate conversations with their children about serious illness or death, while managing their own feelings of grief and carrying other responsibilities; and raise awareness of the expressions of traumatic grief, along with the socio-cultural factors that affect how communities historically mistreated by the health care system cope with dying and death.

Faculty Supervisor:

Joanna Humphreys

Student:

Partner:

Kindred Foundation

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology

University:

McMaster University

Program: