Launch Conference - 07/06/2006
First Response to Grief and Loss was officially launched on the 7th of June in Coventry.
At a conference organised by the Children‘s Fund, Dr Bill Merrington, co-author of the manual, spoke on how grief is the unseen emotional undercurrent which results from loss. All too often as practitioners we can end up managing symptoms, such as anger, without dealing with the underlying pain. Loss comes in many forms and results in varied individual responses. However, we do not need to be experts in order to support children and young people. ’Being there’ and being willing to listen is extremely important and is often enough to enable young people to work through their grief experiences.
Lee Rogerson MBE went on to give an overview of the elements of the resource and how its creation came about through the creative input of a range of talented individuals from fields such as graphic design, film and audio. The high quality technical accomplishment was equally matched by the vision to produce highly practical and comprehensive materials which would be relevant ‘on the ground’. Produced by practitioners for practitioners, First Response to Grief and Loss began its life as a work of passion to meet the needs faced by workers engaging with children and young people who may feel ill equipped in responding to this issue.
The impact of loss experiences and their potential social outworking was graphically highlighted by Declan Kerr (Youth Justice Trust). His study, On the Case, a major impetus behind the development of the First Response resource, demonstrates a correlation between grief and loss and youth offending behaviour. He also noted that similar parallels exist between grief and loss and alcohol and drug misuse, teenage pregnancy and violent crime. In order to address these issues, not only is it necessary that practitioners become more emotionally literate but that young people better understand their emotional states.
A number of delegates from a range of agencies, police, social services, Relate, Cruse, schools and education, NHS, Prince’s Trust, youth service, YOS, Connexions, to name a few, attended the launch. The response was extremely positive and enthusiastic with arrangements being made to widely cascade the resource throughout a number of local and national organisations.
Quote from Declan Kerr
"We’ve been working for a long while in Manchester on some of these issues and we haven’t come nearly as far as you have, in terms of the quality, the simplicity and the confidence to do something with these very important issues...
Where I would like to give praise and acknowledgement with these materials is that you’ve put it into a very simple format.
It no longer needs to be on the ‘hard to do’ pile. It’s very easy to acknowledge what’s going on for another person and provide the environment for that to happen.
Certainly, I’ll be talking about these materials in Manchester and Greater Manchester and anywhere else I am."
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