Jessie Williams is Manager of Community Programs at CCNB, Australia’s largest community-led not-for-profit and she has held multiple leadership roles to improve dying and grief in Australia since 2015. Jessie, through her own lived experience of end-of-life care and grief, is passionate about advocating that death can be done differently. She is a TEDx speaker and regularly delivers presentations to workplaces and place-based communities.

In this episode Jessie Williams reflects on how learnings from her own lived experience and over a decade of work with The Groundswell Project have informed her advocacy to cultivate compassionate workplaces. We explore how the experience of employees returning to work following a bereavement can be significantly improved if workplaces develop grief-informed and death-literate approaches to employee (and collegial) care ahead of time. We also discuss practical strategies, both in–and–beyond the workplace for anyone who is seeking to be a grief ally. Finally, we discussed the unique role that community grief ceremonies hold in offering spaces for grief to be witnessed through ritual and transmuted by ceremony and how these much-needed liminal spaces can be a gentle antidote to the burden of carrying grief in isolation through our social lives.