HOSPICE FUNERALS CAN BE THE BEST, NO QUESTION
Hat’s off to Ann Lee, I say. She’s the courageous CEO of St Margaret’s Hospice, Taunton who has launched a joined-up funeral service with the twin goals of caring for her patients in death and earning some much-needed money to pay for the care her hospice extends to the living. What’s not to like? A […]
Local and community
Guest post by John Porter My first job was in a local grocer’s shop. They boiled ham in their kitchen – hmmmm, I can smell it now – and would cut three special slices, carefully wrapped in greaseproof paper for Mrs Rogers who came in every Tuesday. She chatted for a while, nobody huffed and puffed […]
Imagine this: when someone dies we don’t hand them over to strangers
When the GFG, in conjunction with the Plunkett Foundation, announced a community funerals initiative back in 2012, we supposed that someone might pick it up and run with it. The Plunkett Foundation, far cleverer than us, was pretty confident they would. They contacted all their community shops and community pubs and we waited with bated breath […]
Today is launch day for the GFG bereavement volunteers scheme
Here at the GFG we’ve been banging on about our community volunteering scheme for some time — here and here for starters. The scheme is designed to address short- and medium-term practical problems facing bereaved people in the aftermath of a death. It promotes community engagement and a neighbourly duty of care. It revives, in a 21st […]
Death in the community
From the At Least I Have A Brain blog: Today at Mass we had an elderly Parishioner to bury, who had no mourners. Not one. Empty pews at the front. It was a stark statement that the little man had been married, had no family, his wife had died, and once he went into a […]
We Believe
A new website has just hit the scene: CommunityFunerals.org.uk. It seeks to develop the concept of a not-for profit community funeral service, and presents for consideration four models of what it calls a Community Funeral Society (CFS). It hopes to grow the idea organically by inviting feedback from its readers, then incorporating their ideas. It’s a […]
Way to go?
All things pass. In twenty years from now we shan’t be doing funerals as we do them today. Another good reason for not buying a funeral plan. Incremental change, say a great many reformers, will bring this about. Eventually. It’s worth keeping a weather eye for radical change, too. A few of us have been […]
