#TuesdayTips

Welcome back to #TuesdayTips for leaders of volunteers!
This week we're talking about a sadly necessary topic; dealing with the death of a volunteer, bereavement, and the sensitive balance of personal and professional communications around the person's passing.
Hopefully this is something you never have to deal with, but particularly in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic most of us as leaders of volunteers have had to manage memorial communications and/or events for members of our work team.
Administrative Tasks: Check and change settings for automated communications (emails, calls, texts, etc.) scheduled from the Volunteer Management Software(VMS), general agency email CRM (like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc), and Development/Fundraising (if not the same database) that go to the deceased.
Memorial services/celebrations of life; if the deceased did not leave any specific requests or instructions for how they wanted to be celebrated or memorialized, there can be a delicate balance between what their family wants (especially non-communication and privacy) versus what the person's friends and colleagues want to do to in their honor.
Grace for bereavement; death of loved ones also impacts a volunteer's priorities, schedule, and ability to continue working with an organization. Ideally, there is a leave of absence policy for anyone on the team who needs time off, and of course extend grace and compassion for volunteers who can no longer work with your agency due to the death of someone else.
End of Life expertise and grief counseling; maybe your agency mission involves hospice care, critically ill clients, or trauma and grief counseling, and this is all very familiar to you as a professional policy and process. Are there ways to partner, cross-train, or otherwise share this expertise with other organizations in the community who have been especially impacted by death/grief and do not yet have solid policies for End of Life?
In my teens and twenties I volunteered extensively in AIDS activism/awareness (ACT UP, the AIDS Quilt) and for the San Francisco Zen Hospice. My entry into volunteer engagement was with Project Open Hand, providing food for critically ill (AIDS, cancer, etc.) homebound clients.
Contact me directly for consulting, coaching, webinars/workshops, and if you have ideas for topics and guests on this channel.
[e-mail] www.danalitwinconsulting.com