Other Resources
In addition to the materials that come in the Surviving the Holidays kit, we’ve developed a few online resources to help you and those who’ll attend your outreach seminar.
Online Resources for Leaders
Video
We’ve created a few online videos to help your team understand the potential of this outreach event and the unique dynamics of your discussion time during this outreach event. Make sure your team sees these videos before your event.
Promotional Materials
If you’ve looked around this site for very long, you’ve figured out that promoting this outreach event is the key to its success. (That means more than putting an announcement in your church bulletin.) We want to make your team’s promotional efforts easy. So we created downloadable resources you can use to promote your seminar. How do you get to them? Visit the GriefShare LeaderZone. There you’ll find the following resources:
- News releases
- Letters you can send to GriefShare alumni, other churches, local businesses and the bereaved, making them aware of and inviting them to your event
- Newspaper-ready ads
- Bulletin inserts
- Flyers
- Holiday promo video
- Sample feature article to personalize for your event and send to local newspapers/magazines
- Customized holiday banner
Sign-in Sheets
Collecting the contact information of those who visit your seminar is critical. It allows you to contact guests early next year to remind them about your next meeting. So we’ve created a sign-in sheet that you can use to harvest that information. Use it as a template or to get ideas on how to create your own. You can find this at the GriefShare LeaderZone.
Downloadable Outreach Event Agenda
We’ve learned that many churches are planning their outreach events before their kits arrive. And if that’s what you’re doing, we want to help. So, we’ve placed a downloadable copy of a Surviving the Holidays Event Agenda at the LeaderZone.
Use it as a guide in determining how much time to allot to each part of your meeting. But don’t let our sample agenda constrain your creativity. The sample agenda is only one of many ways to present a successful seminar. Please let us know what other great ideas you have about running your Surviving the Holidays outreach event. We’d love to hear them.
Feedback form
Gather valuable feedback from your event participants for future Surviving the Holidays seminars.
Discussion questions
These discussion questions from your Holiday Leader’s Guide can be downloaded, copied and given to your facilitators for use during the seminar.
Find a Group
List your holiday event on the GriefShare Find-a-Group search engine.
Online Resources for Participants
Participant Website
We’ve created an entire website for participants. When they visit, they’ll discover:
- Web Articles — Short, helpful articles that explain how to deal with issues the bereaved face during the holidays. Article titles include:
- Web Videos — Bonus video clips that we couldn’t squeeze into the video. Some go deeper into the subjects covered in the video. Others address new issues. Sample topics include:
- Find a Group — To find Surviving the Holidays seminars meeting in other locations (such as for friends or relatives in other cities/states), direct your participants to the Find-a-Group search engine at www.griefshare.org/findagroup.
Detailed Information about GriefShare
The participant site links to the main GriefShare site, providing answers to questions like: What is GriefShare? How does GriefShare work? and Where can I find a group?
If you choose to run a holiday seminar, be sure to tell those in your group about the online resources we’ve created for them.