Grief Beyond Belief Now Has a Website!

Grief Beyond Belief banner
Three years ago, Grief Beyond Belief was launched — an online support group for grieving non-believers. It was started as a Facebook group, but while that format worked well for quote a while, the group has become larger, with a wider variety of needs, than a Facebook group could really manage. Also, plenty of people who needed and wanted the service don’t use Facebook.

So last week, Grief Beyond Belief launched its website. It includes interactive forums, a library, a resource guide, and more. Here, I’ll let founder and co-organizer Rebecca Hensler tell you all about it herself.

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Press Release: griefbeyondbelief.org launched

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SECULAR GRIEF-SUPPORT NETWORK, GRIEF BEYOND BELIEF, LAUNCHES INDEPENDENT WEBSITE

On Thursday, June 19th, secular grief support network Grief Beyond Belief will celebrate three years of providing comfort and community to bereaved nonbelievers with the launch of griefbeyondbelief.org, the internet’s first faith-free grief-support website,

Founded by school counselor Rebecca Hensler following the death of her son, Grief Beyond Belief has been operating on Facebook for three years, providing grieving atheists, Humanists and other Freethinkers with spaces in which to share compassion and advice without the uncomfortable intrusions of prayer and proselytizing. From the page’s much-welcomed launch on Facebook in June 2011, to its surprising growth following glowing coverage in USA Today in Spring of 2012, to its expansion to a confidential Facebook support group the following fall, the community has continued to serve the growing secular population’s need for grief-support appropriate for those who do not believe in a higher power or an afterlife.

“When our Facebook Page reached ten thousand “likes” and our support group swelled to over a thousand members,” explains Hensler, “it became clear that it was time to expand to an independent website where we could provide additional resources for grieving nonbelievers.”

The website offers a number of features previously unavailable through Grief Beyond Belief’s Facebook-based presence, including:

* The world’s largest collection of purely secular grief-related writing, videos, and podcasts, presented in a library of over 250 links sortable by topic or medium.
* A directory of grief resources, including a growing list of secular and Humanist funeral officiants in over 25 US states and 4 countries.
* A blog, which will feature links to newly published writing, news and other media related to secular grief as well as content written specifically for Grief Beyond Belief.
* Interactive forums in which members can share thoughts, feelings and stories, seek and offer comfort and advice, and post tributes to the loved ones for whom they are grieving.

The forum feature also allows subgroups within the network to delve deeper into shared experiences, such as grieving while leaving religion, or losses in common, such as miscarriage or bereavement by suicide.

The evolution of Grief Beyond Belief from a Facebook-based support community to an independent website marks an important step in the progress of the secular support movement, a step that is not going unnoticed by leaders and opinion-makers in the secular world.

“I’m so glad Grief Beyond Belief is expanding into a website,” says Greta Christina, author of the newly released Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why. “The service they provide is so important, and now it’ll be much more accessible to a lot more people. The secular grief library and resource guide alone make the site invaluable. And with the website format, it’ll be much easier for grieving non-believers to talk with each other about specific issues they’re dealing with. It’s a big development.”

Sarah Morehead, the Executive Director of Recovering from Religion and American Atheists’ 2013 Atheist of the Year, agrees with Christina about the importance of Grief Beyond Belief’s mission. “People experiencing the heartache and emotional trauma of loss need comfort, community, and acceptance…not conversion attempts.”

Morehead explains how Grief Beyond Belief fits into the larger movement to provide for the emotional needs of the secular community: “Recovering From Religion regularly refers people to Grief Beyond Belief and we see firsthand how much people appreciate a safe, secular, and caring place to deal with the challenging emotions related to the grieving process. Seeing the concept grow from a social media, grassroots effort to a cohesive resource center is truly fantastic, and we are tremendously proud to support and encourage them at every step.”

The website’s launch on June 19, 2014 has been over a year in the planning, as the project has depended on a small group of volunteers to design the site, collect and input links for the library, and gather contact information for the resource directory. All the while, Hensler, her co-administrator, Nita Grigson, and a handful of moderators have continued to provide safe spaces for grieving nonbelievers on Faceboook and plan for the future of secular grief support.

“I know that the next step is to bring secular peer-to-peer grief support into the real world,” says Hensler. “But for now, griefbeyondbelief.org is going to help a whole lot of people who are grieving without faith feel far less alone.”

CONTACT: Rebecca Hensler
TELEPHONE: 415-606-2195
EMAIL: [email protected]

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Grief Beyond Belief Now Has a Website!
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2 thoughts on “Grief Beyond Belief Now Has a Website!

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    […] Three years ago, Grief Beyond Belief was launched — an online support group for grieving non-believers. It was started as a Facebook group, but while that format worked well for quote a while, the group has become larger, with a wider variety of needs, than a Facebook group could really manage. Also, plenty of people who needed and wanted the service don’t use Facebook. [Read more] […]

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