Welcome to All Things Grief!
Brighter Days Family Grief Center is honored to host our third annual professional development conference, created for the dedicated professionals who walk alongside grievers of every age. This one day experience brings together leading voices in caregiving, death, and dying for immersive workshops, inspiring speakers, and meaningful connection with peers who understand both the weight and the privilege of this work. We are especially pleased to introduce a new educator track designed to strengthen grief awareness and support within schools, ensuring that faculty and staff feel equipped to care for grieving students and for one another.
Our community continues to feel the weight of collective grief. Recent tragedies, both close to home and across the world, have shaped our daily sense of peace, safety, and connection. For many grievers, these shared experiences intensify the personal pain of death related loss and complicate the grief journeys already underway. This year’s conference explores how personal loss and community wide trauma intersect, and how professionals can recognize, validate, and support those carrying both, including themselves. Together, we will reflect on pathways toward meaning, resilience, and connection in a community marked by shared loss. Six (6) CEUs will be offered through a series of large and small group presentations with a virtual track available to paid registrants offering up to ten (10) additional CEUs.
Continuing Education credits are currently being applied for through:
- Minnesota Board of Social Work
- Minnesota Board of Behavioral Health and Therapy
- Minnesota Department of Education
- Minnesota Board of Marriage and Family Therapy
- Minnesota Funeral Directors Association
- Minnesota Board of Psychologists
- Minnesota Board of Nursing
An Incredible Day of Education and Connection Awaits!
JC Lippold, MA – Welcome Speaker
When people gather in community, a special attendee appears. Synergy. It is often felt more than it is seen or heard and because of this, it can often be left to one’s wonderings rather than named and utilized as a galvanizing tool for healing and connection. To open our conference, JC will offer tactical and practical tools and musings for the heads, hearts and hands in the room. The synergetic stirring of this hour will prepare you for the day ahead.
ABOUT JC: Alongside his work in fitness, JC is a full time Leadership and Change consultant working alongside Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, civic and educational communities. JC serves as the Director of People & Partnerships for Cadre, the all-in-one mental health and wellness platform that brings content and community together. You can often find JC on KSTP-TV as their wellness expert. JC leads workshops and is writing the seminal text on his concept of Enoughness, the empowering practice of affirming that you are already, indeed enough.
Katy Armendariz, LICSW – Keynote Speaker
This keynote examines collective grief through trauma neuroscience, community psychology, and culturally rooted healing practices, exploring how grief can surface as anger, fear, rage, and social fragmentation that signal deeper collective trauma. Drawing from community mental health work and research on the nervous system, participants will learn how culturally grounded practices, nervous system regulation, and community connection can support movement from collective trauma toward collective healing. Rather than centering only on coping with suffering, the presentation emphasizes how healing practices rooted in community care, cultural wisdom, and nervous system safety can restore connection, resilience, and collective well being.
ABOUT KATY: Katy is the founder of Roots Wellness Center, established in 2013 to provide culturally affirming mental health, substance use, and parenting support services for children, families, and adults. Drawing from her own lived experience and deep community roots, Katy recognized early on the critical importance of trauma informed, culturally rooted, somatic and holistic services delivered by BIPOC providers—those who not only reflect the communities they serve, but also practice through a justice-informed, advocacy-centered lens and focus on challenging the western mental health industrial complex.
Rosie Gaston, LICSW & Zac Willette MDiv., BCC – Closing Speakers
Working in the grief field means holding space for suffering and loss, truth and pain, hope and love, often all at once, which is why so many professionals feel stretched to the point of burnout. Burnout is not a personal failing; it is a predictable outcome of caring deeply within demanding systems during demanding times. Drawing on research from the Nagoski sisters and other leading scholars, this keynote acknowledges burnout as both an individual and systemic experience while focusing on what we can realistically do to sustain ourselves, especially when layered and collective grief weighs us down. Attendees will leave with practical strategies and a renewed sense of agency to build stamina so they can continue showing up for the patients, families, and teams who rely on them and for themselves.
ABOUT ZAC & ROSIE: Zac and Rosie both help people navigate grief, death, and healing with connection and compassion. Zac Willette MDiv BCC, is a board-certified spiritual care provider, teacher, and writer who has accompanied thousands through sickness, death, and healing in trauma centers, ICUs, and hospice settings. His work spans national roles with major health systems and healthcare startups, where he has helped advance conversations about death and dying across the country. Rosie Gaston MSW, LICSW, APHSW-C is an end-of-life social worker, researcher, and educator who discovered her calling while volunteering at a hospice in her 20s. Drawing on her own experiences with significant loss as a teenager and young adult, she has spent nearly a decade in healthcare, developing expertise in facilitating difficult conversations, advocating fiercely for patients and families, and holding space for grief.
Breakout Session Presenters
Watch Our Recap Video!
"In a world where grief is often misunderstood, this gathering serves as a catalyst for vital education and authentic dialogue, charting the course for a society that is more compassionate and understanding towards those who grieve."
Conference Testimonials
I walked away feeling so inspired and excited about this new direction in my career. The conference gave me practical tools I can actually use, but more than that, it helped me understand how meaningful this work really is. Every single presenter was excellent.
Wonderful atmosphere, great camaraderie, very well organized, incredible keynote speaker, left the conference energized!
I thought it was an exceptional conference, and I’ve been to many in my career. The content was rich and varied, the speakers and panelists were authentic, passionate, and inspiring, and I came away with many fresh insights.
I enjoyed connecting with other professionals, the great workshops and presenters, and the vulnerability of sharing how it is to be human and do grief work.
I learned so much about grief and best practices for working with clients who are experiencing grief and loss. This was a weakness in my clinical practice before.
Well organized, warm staff, great communication, the keynote and first presentations were awesome!
Such a great variety of organizations represented with the exhibit tables – thank you! I enjoyed the flow and schedule with both keynote and breakout sessions.
Gaining new hands on activities to use in session with clients, connecting with other therapists and having a comforting space to share our personal experience with grief.
Wonderful speakers, such a great variety of breakout speakers/sessions that it was hard to choose. Great attention to details. Very welcoming.
Thank You to Our Current Sponsors!
