Invisible Community Links

Links

The Natural Death Centre

The Natural Death Centre is unique in providing the only independent funeral advice service in the UK. We provide information on all types of funeral choices, but are especially known for advice & support on family-organised, environmentally-friendly funerals, and Natural Burial Grounds

For more information:

12a Blackstock Mews, Blackstock Road, London N4 2BT

Tel 0871 288 2098

Fax 0207 354 3831

Email Mike Jarvis

mike@alberyfoundation.org

visit: www.naturaldeath.org.uk

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Hospice of the Heart

The Hospice of the Heart is the world's first internet based hospice aimed at improving the quality of death, dispelling fears and raising the standards of compassionate care for the dying. And much else! Worth a visit...

For more information:

Website: www.hospiceoftheheart.org

Contact: Felicity Warner 01308 427393 or email felicity.warner@btinternet.com

Hospice of the Heart

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LifeRites

A phenomenon of our time is that many people are increasingly unable to find meaning or fulfilment in the old religious forms. Connected to this is a corresponding trend in which people seek to create more individual or more meaningful rituals for themselves. At one end of the scale, this might be no more than getting married on a submarine but at the other it could be a moving, woodland burial ceremony, planned by the family. But in the latter situation who can people turn to for advice and who can they ask to officiate at the ceremony?

LifeRites aim it is to respond to this trend. LifeRites is basically a network of registered celebrants and officiants available to conduct and advise on ceremonies where the individuals do not wish to conduct these themselves. The LifeRites group already have five years experience with funerals and a variety of other ceremonies such as name giving and marriage blessings. In addition they are regularly asked to lecture at post graduate level by academic communities and are advisers to three police forces.

LifeRites officiants are trained in helping people write their own event and can advise on what to include or leave out, how to deepen or lighten the mood, and also have training in the legalities and other issues surrounding death. For four years, they have been running their own training programme for people who would like to become celebrants, which consists of a Foundation Certificate, a Diploma and an Advanced Diploma. They also have a lively magazine which discusses the value and meaning of different types of ceremony at the important turning points of life and other related community issues.

There are now about twenty trained LifeRites celebrants and ten assistants and between them they cover virtually the whole of England, Scotland and Wales.

For more information:

The LifeRites Group

Gwndwn Mawr

Trelech

Carmarthenshire, SA33 6SA

Tel: 01994 484527

Email: info@liferites.org

Visit: www.liferites.org

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Interfaith

In response to the growing need for celebrants able to help people create their own individualised funerals and other ceremonies, the Interfaith Seminary was established in the UK in 1996. Originally set up in New York by Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, Interfaith has been training ministers in the USA since 1981. According to their own brochure there is no dogma or fixed ministerial role Each minister serves in their own way in their own community. Some offer services of healing and fellowship and ceremonies to mark birth, marriage, death etcOthers work for example, with the dying or the bereaved, mediating in conflicts or bringing a spiritual perspective to the workplace.

The aim of Interfaith is to draw on the wisdom, prayers and meditations in all religions, and use these in such a way that new services can arise that appeal to individuals from a variety of backgrounds. A picture presented by one minister, the Rev. Jacqueline Clark, was that the great religions of the world could be imagined like the spokes on a wheel, while Interfaith weaves in and out of the spaces between the spokes.

It would seem that Interfaith ministers are given a great deal of scope to develop their own approaches to their ceremonies, but at the same time their training involves learning to value and respect everything that exists in other religions. In a time where one hears increasingly of marriages between individuals from differing religious backgrounds have become a commonplace, one can imagine that Interfaith could fulfil a real need.

For more information:

www.interfaithministers.org.uk

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Family Tree Funeral Service

West of England residents may be interested in this Stroud-based funeral service, that also offers grief support, books and videos on death and dying for both adults and children, memorial celebrations, independent celebrants and events (see website). According to Family Tree Funeral Company many people have had the experience of going to a funeral that somehow did not feel enough like the person who died. And almost half of those in a recent UK survey regretted that they did not know what a friend or relative wanted for their funeral; yet 60% of people in the same survey had not discussed their own funeral arrangements.

For more information:

Family Tree Funeral Company, The Old Painswick Inn, Gloucester Street, Stroud, GL5 1QG

Email: contact@familytreefunerals.co.uk Telephone: 01453 767 769

www.familytreefunerals.co.uk

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