Hand-Held Booklets Offer Guidance to Grievers
Litsa Williams is the cofounder of What’s Your Grief? (WYG). Her company is dedicated to promoting grief education, expression, and exploration in practical and creative ways.
Answering the Call
“WYG started as an online organization in early 2013,” Williams begins. “Our vision was to fill the gap for grief support in the online space. At that time, it was very different from today. We saw the need for reliable resources such as writing and podcasts.”
“One of the first things that happened was that we quickly attracted a lot of professionals who were reading our articles and following our content. Many of them explained that they were printing our articles and handing them out to the people they were serving, and they wondered if we had them in an easier-to-access format.”
“When I met my cofounder, Elanor Haley, we were working in an organization that was serving families who had experienced traumatic, unexpected losses of loved ones. In that space, we were providing people with printed grief support materials, yet we often struggled with the quality of those documents. But at the time, the materials at hand were all that was available.”
Physical Value
“Shortly after founding WYG,” Williams continues, “We realized that there was something really important about being able to give someone who is grieving something physical. A helpful booklet is a lot more meaningful than telling them about a website they can visit.”
“We started to explore the idea of filling the need for physical copies of grief support materials. That idea is what gradually led to our library of readily available printed materials.”
“We have been offering printed grief support materials since 2016. Since identifying the need, there has been an interesting evolution of the demand for these resources. Many of the aftercare programs that use our materials have shared feedback with us about the efficacy of our resources.
New Print Resources
WYG recently partnered with Peer Support Community Partners (PSCP) to publish and distribute a series of Peer-Informed Grief Guides. Each of these compact, user-friendly booklets address a certain type of grief due to specific circumstances. Titles include:
Proof Positive
While PSCP’s Grief Guides are available in PDF format, Williams emphasizes the benefits of a handheld booklet, especially for someone who may be on the go and may need to flip back and forth between pages again and again.
“Although we began as an online outlet,” Williams continues, “We have seen, over the years, just how important print materials are for people who are struggling with grief. Some of the programs that use our materials shared information they gathered from surveys of the families they help. One of the questions was, ‘What has been the most helpful resource we provided for you?’ Often, the answer has been that the simple, printed booklets were the things that were most enduringly helpful.”
"We feel that a booklet is something physical that holds vital information that might otherwise be lost or forgotten. You give it to someone, and they might not read it right away, but they have it for when they need it. A booklet can’t get lost in an email inbox whereas a message in an email can get opened momentarily, and soon after getting buried or disappear into the online ether.”
"We have repeatedly heard from those who benefit from our print materials that they found not only that the booklet helped when they needed it, the information therein directed them to more online resources so that they could find additional support.”
If you are interested in physical copies of PSCP’s Peer-Informed Grief Guides, you can order them individually, or in large quantities On the What’s Your Grief? website.
