Evermore

Accelerating Community Supports: Advancing Bereavement Policy & Systems, Miami, FL
2025-05-19 - 2025-05-20 | Miami Fire Tower, 8000 NW 21st St, Doral, FL, 33122, United States
Bereavement — the death of someone meaningful in our lives — is increasingly a direct concern for millions of people. Given the concurrency of mortality epidemics – homicide, overdose, suicide, maternal mortality, and traffic fatalities – grief and bereavement are an everyday reality for every neighborhood in America. In addition to the immense personal tragedy people experience, bereavement is a problem with vast health, economic, and social consequences. To address these consequences, Evermore is accelerating lasting societal change using data and science to drive policy and practice advancements that are grounded by the lived experiences of individuals and families.
Unbeknownst to most people, bereavement is a significant risk factor for poor health and premature death. It also impacts economic opportunity, redirecting life trajectories downward, and has major spillover effects at every stage of life. Bereavement, for example, is associated with academic failings, substance misuse, teen pregnancy, incarceration, suicide attempts, suicide, and premature death — and a host of other public concerns.
Evermore is working with communities across the nation to increase bereavement awareness, education, and community-based policy actions. To create a more livable world for all bereaved people, we are working with:

Childcare, Daycare, and Afterschool Providers
Clergy, Ordained Leaders, Chaplains, and Faith Leaders
Death Scene Investigators, Coroners, and Medical Examiners
Domestic Violence and Homeless Shelter Staff
Employers, Supervisors, and Human Resource Leaders
Emergency Department Providers and Staff
First Responders
Higher Education Faculty and Staff
Hospital Providers and Staff
Primary Care Providers and Staff
Reporters, the Media, and Influencers
Teachers, Educators, and Staff (K-12)
Social Service Providers

Please join us with the Center for the Advancement of Bereavement Care at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Health System in Miami, Florida, for a conversation on how we can support our neighbors so that all bereaved people can achieve a healthy and prosperous future.

Circles of Remembrance: Listening Sessions with Indian Country
2025-05-12 11:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | https://kauffmaninc.zoom.us/meeting/register/QvorHk2ARKy62eYOcF-sGw#/registration
Kauffman and Associates, Inc. (KAI), Evermore, and the National Center for Fatality Review & Prevention are reimagining how grief and bereavement impact our lives.
To learn more from tribal communities, KAI is facilitating 3 virtual listening sessions to gather insights and reflections from Indian Country on traditions, beliefs, and approaches for coping with loss. The information collected during these listening sessions may help inform future resources that support grieving communities.
Listening Session Dates
Join us for a virtual listening session where we will learn from you about how our ancestors grieved and honored the departed:
Listening Session 1: May 12, 2025, 10 am CT
Listening Session 2: May 19, 2025, 6 pm CT
Listening Session 3: May 27, 2025, 3 pm CT
Please note, you may only register and attend 1 listening session.
Prize Drawing
For each listening session, we will enter participants into a drawing to win 1 of 3 prizes—an Eighth Generation wool blanket, an Eighth Generation cotton blanket, or an Eighth Generation water bottle.
About Kauffman and Associates, Inc.
KAI is a 100% American Indian– and woman-owned small business specializing in planning, evaluation, communications, training, and facilitation.
Meet the Listening Session Facilitators

Danica Love Brown, MSW, CACIII, PhD, is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma born and raised in northern New Mexico. Danica is the Vice President for Behavioral Health Transformations at KAI and has worked as a mental health and substance use counselor, social worker, and youth advocate for 30 years. She is an Indigenous Wellness Research Institute ISMART fellow, a Council of Social Work Education member, a Minority Fellowship Program fellow, and a Northwest Native American Research Center for Health fellow. Her research has focused on Indigenous Ways of Knowing and decolonizing methodologies to address historical trauma and health disparities in tribal communities.

Keli King, MSW, LCSW, CAS, is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Meskwaki Nation and Sac & Fox Tribe of Oklahoma. Keli is the Indigenous resilience coordinator at KAI. She received her Master of Social Work, with a focus in Indigenous trauma and resiliency, from the University of Toronto, and she is a licensed clinical social worker. Keli has 17 years of experience in social work for tribal communities with a focus on healing from generational trauma.

Cortney Yarholar, LMSW, is a member of the Sac & Fox Nation and a descendant of the Creek, Otoe & Pawnee Tribes. He serves as a tribal technical assistance (TA) specialist for KAI’s behavioral health transformation team. Cortney has over 20 years of experience in children, youth, and family mental health and recovery services and systems development. His passion is in decreasing suicide among youth, eliminating behavioral health disparities among American Indian and Alaska Native populations, and helping organizations be more culturally responsive and responsible for the people they serve through training and TA that promotes diversity and inclusion.
About the Contract
These sessions are supported through a $5,149,996 cooperative agreement from the Health Resources and Services Administration with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Contact Information
For questions, contact Keli King, keli.king@kauffmaninc.com

Oh, Broken-Open Heart: A Poetry Gathering for Mourners and Mothers
2025-05-08 19:00 - 20:30 | https://letsreimagine.org/76768/oh-broken-open-heart-a-mothers-day-poetry-gathering-for-mourners
Join Reimagine and Evermore for an hour and a half of poetry, writing, conversation, and connection. Poets James Crews and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer provide a virtual refuge for people who have lost a mother/mother figure or a child.

Mother’s Day can be an especially difficult time for those of us who have lost a mother or child—whether the loss is through death or estrangement. Perhaps you feel isolated, angry, or frustrated. Perhaps you struggle with feeling down on a day heralded as a celebration. Perhaps you are just plain sad. You are not alone.
Join us for this intimate, whole-heart-affirming program, led by James Crews (who lost his mother) and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (who lost her son), which begins with the poets sharing poems and speaking openly about how writing has helped them meet grief. Then they will offer invitations for participants to do their own writing, followed by a conversation about what rises up when we turn toward our loss and write into our heartache.
This is a chance to both mourn and honor. A chance to integrate loss into our lives, weaving it into the larger tapestry of who we are and how we meet the world. It’s a chance to experience how writing can help us feel closer to the ones we have lost. It’s a chance to find nourishment through our connection with others who are also in grief.
Please note that by registering, you acknowledge that your email will be shared between Evermore and Reimagine to keep you informed about upcoming events, resources, and community initiatives.
James Crews
James Crews is the editor of several bestselling anthologies, including The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. James is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry—The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment—and a book of short essays, Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection. James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont.
https://www.jamescrews.net/
@jamescrewspoet
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker, and writing facilitator who co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast on the creative process. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023) and The Unfolding (Wildhouse Publishing). In January 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder, and love through poetry. One-word mantra: Adjust.
https://www.wordwoman.com/
@rosemerry.trommer
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together in the hopes of healing ourselves and the world. We specifically support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and – at our own pace – actively channeling life’s biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
@letsreimagine
About Evermore
Evermore is dedicated to making the world a more livable place for all bereaved people. For over ten years, Evermore has worked with Congress, The White House, and multiple federal agencies to advance commonsense, human-centered policies for all people in our nation, including securing paid bereavement leave for our U.S. Armed Forces.
@evermoreforall
Evermore Community Newsletter
Emerging Science & Trends Newsletter

The Mystery of Grief: Writing into the Loss
2025-05-07 19:00 - 21:00 | https://secure.everyaction.com/4xzmZz6W8UOj0T4Ev-ztiw2
When we lose loved ones, writing can be a powerful tool for helping us remember them, helping us re-encounter the world without them, and helping us re-know ourselves as the loss transforms us.
In this two-hour online program, Evermore Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer a few suggestions for writing. Together, we will read poems about grief and discuss them. We will have chances to do our own writing, there will be optional time for sharing what we wrote, and we will have time to reflect on the effect writing has on us.

Accelerating Community Supports: Advancing Bereavement Policy & Systems, Kalamazoo, MI
2025-05-05 15:30 - 16:30 | Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, 300 Portage, Kalamazoo, MI, United States
Bereavement — the death of someone meaningful in our lives — is increasingly a direct concern for millions of people. Given the concurrency of mortality epidemics – homicide, overdose, suicide, maternal mortality, and traffic fatalities – grief and bereavement are an everyday reality for every neighborhood in America. In addition to the immense personal tragedy people experience, bereavement is a problem with vast health, economic, and social consequences. To address these consequences, Evermore is accelerating lasting societal change using data and science to drive policy and practice advancements that are grounded by the lived experiences of individuals and families.
Unbeknownst to most people, bereavement is a significant risk factor for poor health and premature death. It also impacts economic opportunity, redirecting life trajectories downward, and has major spillover effects at every stage of life. Bereavement, for example, is associated with academic failings, substance misuse, teen pregnancy, incarceration, suicide attempts, suicide, and premature death — and a host of other public concerns.
Evermore is working with communities across the nation to increase bereavement awareness, education, and community-based policy actions. To create a more livable world for all bereaved people, we are working with:

Child Care Providers
Death investigators/Coroners
Domestic & Homeless Shelters
Employers
Faith Leaders
First Responders
Healthcare Specialists
Primary Care
ER providers
Higher Education
Reporters
Schools (K-12)
Social Worker & Therapists (Counselors)

Please join us at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a conversation on how we can support our neighbors so that all bereaved people can achieve a healthy and prosperous future.

Join Evermore’s Lived Experience Bereavement Research Network!
2025-05-01 12:00 - 14:00 | https://evermore.org/lived-experience-bereavement-research-network/
Join Evermore’s Lived Experience Bereavement Research Network!
For too long, bereavement research has failed to give bereaved people a voice and to incorporate the real-world factors that matter to grieving people, especially to their health and well-being. The narrow focus on what’s “wrong” with us and why we haven’t adapted to our loss on a specific timeline simply does not resonate with a large portion of people’s lived experience. Without input from those living with grief, researchers cannot know the most important research questions to ask and what kinds of care models and interventions should be developed.
Evermore, with financial support from PCORI, has established the Lived Experience Bereavement Research Network (LEBRN) to do just that. LEBRN will bring together people with varied backgrounds and expertise, including people who have experienced bereavement themselves — bereaved parents, children, siblings, spouses, and community leaders — alongside bereavement care providers and researchers. Over the next two years, we will identify how to best engage with bereaved people during research endeavors and we will recommend research questions, from the perspective of lived experience, to guide the future of bereavement research.
As part of LEBRN, Evermore is engaging all bereaved people who would like to share their experiences, opinions, and insights to inform future bereavement research.

It’s FREE! It’s virtual. Sign up today!

The Future of Bereavement Care: Recent National Developments
2025-04-05 13:15 - 14:30 | The Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town, 800 Rio Grande Blvd NW, Albuquerque, NM, 87104, United States
In 2023, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a little-known federal agency, was Congressionally directed during FY23 to establish an evidence base for what constitutes high-quality bereavement and grief care. As a result, AHRQ commissioned a systematic review, which was informed by an independent subject matter experts panel, to assess the feasibility of developing consensus-based quality standards for high-quality grief and bereavement care.
In June 2024, AHRQ, in partnership with the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), hosted the expert panel of academics, federal policy officials, and leaders from local and national non-profits in Rockville, Maryland. The panel discussed the draft systematic report (which was also available for public comment) reviewing interventions to improve the care of bereaved persons, including “evaluations of screening approaches, diagnostic accuracy studies, grief interventions, and treatment of grief disorder studies reporting on an intervention and concurrent control group or comparator intervention” (Executive Summary). Literature searches identified 8,301 articles, 3,497 of which were obtained as full text, but only 166 met the eligibility criteria to be considered in the report.
Feedback from the experts and public will be incorporated into a final report anticipated to be released in the Fall of 2024 (i.e., before ADEC 2025). In addition, SAMHSA is developing a website devoted to bereavement issues, among other outcomes.
In this panel presentation, members of the Expert Panel (Joanne Cacciatore, Arizona State University; Dale Larson, Santa Clara University; Joyal Mulheron, Evermore; and William Worden (Panel invitee unable to attend) will discuss these recent developments and their implications for bereavement care, including what they tell us about the current state of bereavement care, the best directions for the future of this care, and how ADEC’s members can contribute to these national efforts.

The Higher Education Leave Plan: A Practical Toolkit to HELP Bereaved College Students
2025-04-03 16:00 - 17:00 | The Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town, 800 Rio Grande Blvd NW, Albuquerque, NM, 87104, United States
Despite 40% of students being within two years of losing a loved one, the majority of higher education institutions (HEIs) do not have student bereavement policies. In response, the Higher Education Leave Plan (HELP) was formed in conjunction with Evermore, a national, non-partisan nonprofit, to develop a pragmatic toolkit to help HEIs support grieving students, including templates, policy examples, strategic approaches to bereavement programs, and a database of institutions with such policies. Attendees will leave with practical knowledge, including various tangible HELP toolkit components, resources focused on the unique needs of bereaved students, and feasible, low-cost ways to assist them. At the completion of this presentation, participants will be able to:

Describe the benefits of a centralized bereavement/grief absence policy for students
Express the key components of a bereavement/grief absence policy for students
Utilize the HELP toolkit to formulate a student bereavement leave policy at their own institution

Renegade Grief Roadshow: Washington, D.C.
2025-03-31 19:00 - 21:00 | Giggle Water DC, 1333 P Street, Northwest, DC, 20005, United States
Join us for an event to bring together the The Dinner Party community and its allies in Washington D.C. to celebrate the release of Renegade Grief: A Guide to The Wild Ride of Life After Loss by Carla Fernandez.

Join Carla in conversation with Joyal Mulheron, Founder and Executive Director of Evermore and K Scarry, Founder of Creative Impact Studio and Giggle Water. This event will have a brief reading, a lively discussion on the importance of community care in times of loss, and a chance to connect with fellow grievers in Washington, DC. Join us in bringing together The Dinner Party community and its allies, past, present and future.
This event will be located at Giggle Water, 1333 P St NW, Washington, DC 20005
Can’t make the event? Purchase a copy of Renegade Grief here.
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From grief quests to altar-making, to dinner parties to Dungeons & Dragons, Renegade Grief is a profound and vulnerable exploration of care practices and rituals that empower grievers in a culture that expects us to simply “give it time.”
Shaped by her own experience with the death of her father and her time cofounding The Dinner Party, a leading peer-support organization for people who’ve experienced a major loss, Carla Fernandez pushes back on the death-denying culture we live in. For too long, grief has been treated as something pitiable, simply sad, to be gotten over as soon as possible. But after fifteen years of being in a community with fellow grievers, Carla has witnessed a different side of the story. Grieving a significant loss is hardcore, hardly something to be swept under the rug, but an experience to be held with respect, a creative spirit, and with friends. Through inspiring stories of real grievers, patterns from across history, and fresh science, Renegade Grief enlivens you with the permission and possibility to explore your grief in your own unique way and reminds you that you’re not alone in doing it.
Learn more about Renegade Grief.
Have questions? Please email nikki@carlafernandez.co

Carla Fernandez’s work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. She is the cofounder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-support circles for young adult grievers, featured in The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, and cited in multiple books. In addition to her work in grief, Carla partners with a range of clients through her community design studio as an impact strategist and facilitator, particularly on initiatives related to climate change, democracy, and the arts. Carla is a senior fellow with USC’s Annenberg School Innovation Lab and a Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley and Joshua Tree.
Joyal Mulheron
Founder & Executive Director, Evermore
Ms. Mulheron spent twenty-five years advising high-ranking politicians, including governors and The White House, and translating basic science into public policy. She has enjoyed leading significant initiatives for the National Governors Association, the National Academies of Science, and the American Cancer Society. Ms. Mulheron holds a master’s in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University and degrees in Biochemistry and English from Virginia Tech, as well as a minor in Chemistry. After a series of high-profile death events and the death of her daughter, Ms. Mulheron founded Evermore to change policy, advance research, and improve the lives of all bereaved people.
K Scarry is a DC area native, who has always been curious about how to build communities of care that allow people to thrive. She was on staff at the Dinner Party labs for many years before starting her own community consulting business and opening Giggle Water bar in DC! When she’s not working, you can find her journaling, stocking an art vending machine, or spending time with her partner + their pups.
