Grief literacy: A call to action for compassionate communities

Abstract

The compassionate communities movement challenges the notion that death and dying should be housed within clinical and institutional contexts, and works to normalize conversations about death and dying by promoting death literacy and dialogue in public spaces. Community-based practices and conversations about grief remain marginal in this agenda. We aimed to theorize how grief could be better conceptualized and operationalized within the compassionate communities movement. We develop the concept of Grief Literacy and present vignettes to illustrate a grief literate society. Grief literacy augments the concept of death literacy, thereby further enhancing the potential of the compassionate communities approach.