As Australia prepares for Dying to Know Day on 8 August 2024, JESSIE WILLIAMS, a major force behind the day, shares her thoughts about a new idea she and her team are working on to improve the connections between the dying in our community and those who’d like to actively support them.
What is it like to journey with someone as they are dying – if you’re not a spiritual guide, a nurse or a palliative care person? Your answer will likely depend on your own state of mind, your age and health, your passion and interests, and perhaps your relationship to that person.
For the regular people who’ve had this experience (and I’m speaking from both a personal and professional point of view) one thing we can all agree on, is that we have learnt stuff. It’s likely we have learnt about the health care system, about people’s emotional needs, about our own comfort and our view of mortality.
We may have painful memories or even memories of triumph.
It’s a valuable, painful, remarkable threshold to cross, especially with people we dearly love. In all cases, it is a learning experience.
Learning is so core to being human, isn’t it?
When we stop learning, it’s almost akin to a little death. I am encouraged today by the social movement that exists to reclaim dying in the community. It is filled with so much passion, activism and activation, because it’s driven by a thirst for real learning. I believe in building and sharing knowledge about how to do the ending part of life.
I know from personal experience that when you learn something that you find empowering, you naturally want to share it with others.
And every three minutes someone in Australia dies.
Every three minutes there is an opportunity for more connection, more love, more resolution.
The Compassionate Connector Program
We are relying on this passion to share as we build a new program in northern Sydney to help people have better deaths.
We’re calling it the Compassionate Connector Program.
We’re not the first to do it, but we’re the first to establish it here.
It is a model of building social connection at end of life which was established by Professor Samar Aoun in Western Australia. Thanks to support from the Sydney North Health Network and The Wicking Trust, we’re translating the model for the northern Sydney community, commencing January 2025.
This is not a clinical program, it relies on experienced, compassionate, and passionate people to say YES to sharing their knowledge and helping others.
We call these people Connectors.
Our hope is that those who naturally love to connect people and who want to build their own death literacy, will put their hands up to join us in this pilot program. This is death literacy in action.
The Connector’s role is to enhance supportive and sustainable networks around families in need. Connectors can be a lynchpin to Compassionate Communities. Compassionate Communities is a practice that openly encourages, supports and celebrates caring for each other during life’s most testing times, especially those associated with life threatening or life limiting illness, chronic disability, being a carer, frailty, ageing, dementia, dying and grief.
Compassion is the community’s responsibility, that’s me, you, all individuals, families, peers, neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools, health services, government, faith based, voluntary and other organisations and services.
Social networks
Social networks are at the heart of the compassionate communities movement and the compassionate communities movement is about building social networks. We see connectors as the lynchpin in the social network. Connectors build on the ‘ties’, the strength of relationships, working from the dying person and their inner circle of friends and family outwards.
Many members of our community don’t get the number of visits they would like in their homes and the people they do have in their lives can be overwhelmed with the tasks of caring. A connector can come in side by side and identify opportunities to encourage more people to get involved in that person’s life. A connector makes it easier to ask for and accept help.
This program welcomes people with a multitude of experiences in end-of-life care, to actively help strengthen social networks for those facing the ending of their life.
Other ways of being a connector
There are so many ways in which communities can encourage, support and celebrate how they care for each other, here are just a few:
- Run a Death Café – where you eat cake and discuss one topic (you guessed it, death!)
- Host a legacy workshop where memory boxes are made
- Host a Last Aid training, 4-hour community education program
- Develop grief tending workshops to help other community groups understand grief so they are more inclusive
You might have your own ideas about ways you can contribute. So please get in touch with your ideas and to help us, at the following email address: hello@proveda.com.au
And if you’d like to hear more about Compassionate Connector Program when it’s established, we’d also love to hear from you.
In the meantime to find out more about Dying to Know Day 2024, go to the page below.
A few Background facts
Today Jessie Williams is the Community Manager at Proveda and through its flagship Dying to Know Day campaign, and a range of compassionate community initiatives, she works nationally to support individuals, organisations and communities to improve dying and grief.
Proveda is the new name for Community Care Northern Beaches (CCNB) which took over the Groundswell Project, the home of Dying to Know Day, until 2021.
Dying to Know Day started in 2013.
The term ‘compassionate communities’ was first coined by Professor Allan Kellehear. Professor Kellehear was the first non-clinical palliative care professor, starting at Australia’s La Trobe University in 1998.
Resources
To read more than 400 articles to help you navigate death, grief and dying go to: https://good-grief.com.au
To find out more about Professor Allan Kellehear and his Compassionate Communities program, go to: https://compassionate-communitiesuk.com/2020/07/24/survival-of-the-kindest-allan-kellehear/
To find out about Western Australia’s South West Compassionate Communities, go to: https://comcomnetworksw.com/compassionate-connectors-program/
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