Grief Support
The “Grief Support: Contemporary Approaches to Care and Support” training program consists of two levels — Basic and Professional — and was developed to strengthen the professional community and build a network of specialists capable of providing high-quality psychosocial support to individuals experiencing loss.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Basic Level: For Those Supporting People in Communities
Target audience:
Veteran support workers, educators, healthcare professionals, chaplains, HR managers, veterans, and anyone seeking to strengthen their understanding of grief and loss in order to support people within their communities, organizations, or teams.
Course duration:
24 hours of theory and practice + 4 hours of group work
Course focus:
Foundational understanding of the grief process; ethics of presence when accompanying a person in grief; family support; working with complex loss; and developing skills for facilitating peer support groups and strengthening community-based support.
Professional Level: Advanced Training for Mental Health Practitioners
Target audience:
Psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists, and social workers providing mental health care to individuals who have experienced loss due to war, captivity, occupation, suicide, illness, accidents, or other causes, and who wish to deepen their professional competence in grief and bereavement support.
Course duration:
36 hours of theory and practice + 16 hours of supervised practice
Course focus:
A solid theoretical foundation combined with hands-on skill development aimed at addressing the psychological impact of war. Topics include: models of grief and bereavement; concepts of death and meaning-making; ethics of grief accompaniment; family dynamics of loss; disenfranchised grief; suicide bereavement; complicated grief; non-death losses; grief integration and meaning reconstruction; the role of community and support groups; intervision (peer professional support).
In 2025, over 250 specialists and support practitioners from across Ukraine were trained to provide ongoing grief support and counselling.
The 2025 training programs were delivered in partnership with the International Institute of Postgraduate Education and the Ukrainian Institute of Traumatherapy, with financial support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Norad), DanChurchAid, and Norwegian Church Aid in Ukraine.