Stretch Goal: $5000
Together we have met the $1200 goal necessary to publish the ebook of the handbook. Donations over that amount will be used to compensate my time researching and writing the book. If donations reach $5000, I will publish a paper copy of the book to make available at conferences and speaking engagements. All donors of $100 of more will be listed -- or may choose a loved one to honor -- in the print edition.
My Story
The story of The Secular Grief Support Handbook starts with my son Jude. He was born with Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia, a rare and severe birth defect. We only had three months with our funny, fussy, lovey little guy, but he changed everyone around him, including me.
I had never heard of online grief support before I was grieving for my son, but when I discovered a group for grieving parents, I found that talking to other people who were going through a similar struggle made the difference between despair -- and thinking I was losing touch with reality -- and survival and even healing. The only problem was that in every online grief support group I encountered, most of the other participants had some sort of faith belief, and in particular a belief in an afterlife.
When I went looking for grief support for nonbelievers, instead I discovered other nonbelievers suffering from the same lack and sense of isolation I was. Lots of people were talking about the need for nonreligious, nonspiritual grief support, but no one was doing anything.
I founded Grief Beyond Belief as a Facebook page to address that lack. Grief Beyond Belief has since expanded -- with a lot of help -- to a confidential online support group and a website. And people say all the time how important the community has been in helping them live with grief without faith. But just as often, community members ask for what is still lacking: in-person grief support groups for atheists, Humanists and other nonbelievers.
That's why I have written The Secular Grief Support Handbook. It isn't a self-help book; it's a how-to-help-others book. In just about 50 pages, I have shared everything an organizer or organization needs to plan their own grief support event, whether it's a one-time meeting or workshop, an ongoing peer-to-peer support group, or even a therapeutic group for those recently bereaved.
Chapters of the book include:
The Nature of Secular Grief
Assessment of Grief Support Needs
Choosing a Grief-Support Format
A Brief Guide to Facilitation
Discussion Topics and Activities
Potential Challenges and Ways to Address Them
What makes me qualified to write this book?
- Founding the world's first and largest community of peer-to-peer grief support entirely free of religion, spiritualism, pseudoscience or woo.
- Reading and listening to the thoughts, feelings and stories of grieving nonbelievers for over six years.
- Multiple classes in the Study of Grief and Loss program at UC Berkeley Extension. (Unfortunately, mostly this has served to show me how little information is being shared with grief support professionals about how to better serve grieving nonbelievers.)
- 30 years of experience in facilitation in a broad range of settings, from college dormitories, to activist organizations, to educational professional development, to grief support groups.
- Conducting many of the first grief support workshops ever provided specifically for those grieving without belief in god or an afterlife.
- Personal experience of grieving without faith, both before faith-free grief support existed, and since.
How can your donation help bring The Secular Grief Support Handbook to people who will use it?
Publishing The Secular Grief Support Handbook as an ebook will make it affordable and accessible to a lot of organizers and community organizations, like secular student groups, Humanist congregations, ethical societies, etc. But a good ebook -- one that isn't full of crappy formatting, grammatical errors and typos -- requires professional editing, formatting, and design. For the sake of transparency, here's my current budget:
Editing and "cleanup": $550-$700
Formatting: $100-$200
Design: $200-$300
Total production costs: $850 to $1200
You will notice that this budget doesn't include paying myself for writing the handbook. If this fundraiser brings in more than the costs of publishing, I will start to compensate myself for the months of my last three summer "vacations" (I am a middle school counselor during the school year) that I have spent writing and re-writing it.
What kind of perks do you get as a donor?
The basic perks are public acknowledgement for your support of the project, free downloads of the handbook for yourself or an organizer or organization of your choice, and various levels of personal support and consultation from me, the author, all the way up to an in-person presentation and a secular grief support workshop.
If you yourself have been helped in your grieving process by participating in any way in the Grief Beyond Belief community, donating in the name of the loved one for whom you are grieving is a beautiful way to honor that person and "pay forward" your appreciation for secular grief support. Their name will be included on The Secular Grief Support Handbook web page and/or in the handbook itself.
Here are the details regarding donation perks:
$20 Donation:
- One pre-release download of The Secular Grief Support Handbook for you or a secular organization of your choice. Available as a PDF file or through Smashwords.
- Public acknowledgement of you or a loved one on The Secular Grief Support Handbook Facebook page.
$50 Donation:
- The above, plus access to an online webinar on secular grief support by handbook author Rebecca Hensler for you or a secular organizer of your choice.
$100 Donation:
The above, plus:
- Acknowledgment of you or a loved one in the handbook afterword.
- A customized 20 minute Skype, Facetime or Google Hangout consultation with handbook author Rebecca Hensler for you or a secular organization of your choice.
$500 Donation:
- Ten pre-release downloads of The Secular Grief Support Handbook for secular organizations of your choice. Available as PDF files or through Smashwords.
- Acknowledgment of you or a loved one on the dedication page of the handbook.
- A presentation and Q&A on secular grief on Skype or a similar platform by handbook author Rebecca Hensler for the organization of your choice.
$500 + Travel Costs Donation:
- Ten pre-release downloads of The Secular Grief Support Handbook for secular organizations of your choice. Available as PDF files or through Smashwords.
- Acknowledgment of you or a loved one on the dedication page of the handbook and on The Secular Grief Support Handbook Facebook page.
- An in-person talk and Q&A on secular grief – and a secular grief-support workshop – by handbook author Rebecca Hensler for the organization of your choice.
What if I don't reach my fundraising goal?
I publish the book anyway. I've planned all along for the possibility that I end up paying out of pocket to publish The Secular Grief Support Handbook and give it away to anyone who is willing to use it. It won't be as pretty, and I will have devoted a whole lot of time without recompense, but it will still be worth it to have helped other people help grieving nonbelievers.
Challenges
Again, I know that donors, particularly in the secular community, appreciate transparency. So I want to be open about the challenges I face in self-publishing the handbook and distributing it.
- I have never self-published before. I have done a lot of writing, but usually for publications, or for other people's blogs. So this is new to me. I am leaning a lot on friends who have published and self-published to help me along the way.
- I'm not a community organizer. Grief Beyond Belief itself is an independent project, unaffiliated with any large secular organization. So I will need to reach out to the big networks to get the word out about the handbook, if it is going to get into the hands of those who will use it.
- This is not a project of Grief Beyond Belief. Grief Beyond Belief itself has a policy limiting the use of the various community platforms (Facebook page and group, website, etc.) for commercial purposes. So even as founder I am as limited as any other secular grief writer in how I can use the community to get the word out.
