Jana DeCristofaro, LCSW, is the Community Response Program Coordinator at Dougy Center where she also hosts the Dougy Center’s long running podcast Grief Out Loud. Since 2002, Jana has coordinated peer support groups for children, teens, young adults and adults. She also provides consultation and training for grieving families, students, community members and professionals locally and nationally.

In this episode, we discuss how implicit social expectations about grief can place further pressures on people who are grieving and how learning to be an effective grief-ally involves becoming more familiar with the all-too-human experience of heartache. We also discuss how schools can respond when facing the death of students or staff, by exploring how the existing caring capacities which schools nurture in everyday life are just as important as specialist mental-health supports, when responding to grief.