CELEBRANTS’ CONFERENCE 2015: RITES OF PASSAGE
17th/18th October, Scarman Conference Centre, University of Warwick
Click here to book your place.
Schedule
Sat 17th October
11.00 – 12.30 Reception
Arrivals
Check in and leave bags (rooms available from 3pm)
At the conference desk you can register for conference, then check your workshop selections.
12.30 – 13.20 – Lakeview Restaurant
Lunch
13.30 – 14.30 – Plenary 1
Welcome and Address by Ewan Main, Ceremonies Board Chair
A Review of the Year by Isabel Russo, Head of Ceremonies
14.10 – 14.40 – Plenary 2
Address by Andrew Copson,Humanists UKChief Executive
14.40 – 15.00 – Cafe / bar
Tea/coffee and chat
15.00 – 16.00 – Workshop 1
A choice of six workshops – see workshop list for details
16.00 – 16.20 – Cafe / bar
Tea/coffee and chat
16.25 – 17.15 – Plenary 3
Serving the Network: Insights from the Marketing Committee and Quality Assurance Committee
17.15 – 18.00 – Keynote
Linda Woodhead MBE – The Changing Face of Ritual
Q&A with Linda
18.00 – 18.15
Reflections on the day
18.15 – 19.15
Free time
19.15 – 20.00 – Cafe / bar
Reception drinks
20.00 – 22.00 – Gala Dinner
Dinner and entertainment, featuring comedy from the world’s first ‘stand-up’ humanist celebrant!
Sun 19th October
07.30 – 09.10 – Lakeview restaurant
Breakfast and check out
08.40 – 09.05 – Reception
Sunday delegates register
09.15 – 10.15 – Workshop 2
A choice of six workshops – see workshop list for details
10.15 – 10.25 – Cafe/bar
Last opportunity to check out of room
10.30 – 11.10 – Plenary 4
‘Ask a Funeral Director’
11.15 – 12.15 – Workshop 3
A choice of six workshops – see workshop list for details
12.15 – 12.30 – Cafe/bar
Tea/coffee and chat
12.35 – 13.35 – Plenary 5
Q&A with Head of Ceremonies, Head of Operations, incoming and outgoing Ceremonies Board, QAC, MaC and Head Trainers
13.35 – 13.45
Close and votes of thanks by Bill Stephenson, Ceremonies Board Chair-Elect
13.45 – 14.45 – Lakeview restaurant
Lunch
14.45
Farewells and Departures
Workshops
A starters’ guide to promoting yourself as a celebrant: what you need to know and what you don’t need to worry about (Hannah Hart)
This workshop is aimed at those relatively new to celebrancy and/or who don’t have much confidence in or enthusiasm for marketing. It will take you through the basics and concentrate on where you can most efficiently expend your time and energy, including letting you know what activities just don’t seem to be worth the effort.
Part of the workshop will be loosely based on the first ‘how to’ marketing guide (how to get started with marketing) but there’ll be plenty of time for discussion and practical examples too. We’ll also show you what marketing resources there are, not just what publications you can access but also what’s there to help you with your own marketing on a local level
Assuring Quality (Barbara Chandler)
Pitfalls to look out for, to ensure our clients get the best ceremony they can, and still love us! Exploring ways to develop and protect ourselves against things going wrong in our own practice.
Beyond words: The place and use of symbolic objects, artefacts and images in family/couples meetings (Tag McEntegart)
Unlocking what starts as ‘beyond words’ to release the words that we can find, together with our families and couples, that will uniquely meet their needs and wants
Families and couples with whom we work could benefit qualitatively from the development, by us as celebrants, of a range of tools and methods for communicating ‘beyond words’. We’ll explore ways that we can unlock, more effectively and sensitively, our families’ and couples’ stories, in their own words, rather than ‘blaming’ them for not communicating with us in the way we expect them to.
Tag McEntegart is running this practical and participatory workshop for the second year, for celebrants of all ceremonies, examining one of the most challenging situations that can face celebrants: when ‘words fail’ our families and couples, and we fail them, when our overwhelming reliance on their verbal articulacy runs out of steam!
Dementia Friends information session (Ewan Main / Maggie Platts)
A Dementia Friend learns a little bit more about what it’s like to live with dementia and then turns that understanding into action—from telling others, to saying hello to somebody with dementia, to making small changes in their workplaces or communities. The aim is that, by 2020, there will be four million Dementia Friends in the country.
So, an appropriately humanistic thing to be involved in—and, especially given how often funerals work encounters issues around dementia, a chance to gain some confidence and understanding. This session will be run by one of our celebrants who is an official Dementia Friends Champion, trained and supported by the Alzheimer’s Society. By attending, you’ll officially be counted towards the four million!
Humanist funeral ceremonies: can we provide comfort and hope? (Mike Ashbridge)
When talking about humanism to local groups and societies a common question is; how does humanism provide people with the comfort and hope that faith based organisations can? The frequency of this question and the importance of the answer to those who ask it, makes it clear that finding the answer is essential to any meaningful growth of humanism.
So there is a great urgency to answering this question. And the challenge of this task rests with you – as most people’s first and maybe only experience of humanism is when they meet a humanist celebrant.
This workshop will explore how we can try to provide meaningful comfort and hope through our work as funeral celebrants. Come along and be part of this important work – humanism needs you!
Improving your website (Hannah Hart / Andrew West)
The most effective way you can promote yourself as a celebrant – for all ceremonies, even funerals – is through your website. If you’ve already got a celebrant website and understand the basics (how to edit, creating different pages, include pictures etc.) but feel it needs reviewing and improving, then this is the session for you.
The workshop will be run by Andrew West (technical expertise and all-round trouble shooter) and Hannah Hart (marketing officer & celebrant) and will loosely follow the ‘How to optimise your website’ marketing guide.
But we’ll be responsive to people’s needs and they’ll be plenty of time to ask questions and to learn from the experiences of other celebrants. We’d like this session to be as practical as possible so you are very welcome to work on your website during the session if you want to bring along a laptop / tablet and, of course, the login details for your site.
Murder or mercy: a celebrant’s perspective on assisted dying (Noel Scott)
Title says it all.
Running your own business – administration, basic accounting and tax for the newly self-employed (Catriona McLellan)
Dealing with finances and paperwork can be challenging, especially when you are getting your business up and running, but getting it wrong can be costly and time-consuming to fix. This session will give you the confidence to get started in the best way, and to know where to go if you need help. Suitable for trainee and recently accredited celebrants who are running their own business for the first time.
Basic book-keeping
HMRC & Tax returns
Financial planning
Keeping records, including data protection
Biog: As Head of Operations at Humanists UK, Catriona is responsible for the finances, administration and ICT of Humanists UK, and supports treasurers of sections with their finances. Her previous role at TaxAid gives her insight into what can go wrong and how to avoid common mistakes people make when starting their businesses.
Speaking louder than words: Ritual and symbolic actions in funerals (Carole Truman / Tag McEntegart)
The purpose of this workshop is to explore how the use of different forms of ritual and symbolic action can add depth, uniqueness and poignancy to funeral ceremonies. The workshop leaders will draw upon their own experience of conducting funerals where families/participants have been supported and / or encouraged to undertake some form of action during the ceremony. Examples will include: Lighting of Candles; Making contact with /personalising the coffin; graveside symbolic actions; singing in funerals; group call and response, with mourners participating etc etc. Workshop participants will be encouraged to share their own examples of ritual / symbolic action – and also to discuss occasions where things ‘might have gone better’. Collectively, we will share practical ideas as to how whatever ‘better’ means might have been achieved through the use of ritual and symbolic action.
Using technology to make our job easier (Jon Trevor)
A look at some of the ways modern technology – tablets, recording pens, computers, the cloud – can make us more efficient, more reliable, more ecological.
Voice (Jon Trevor)
This practical workshop involves an exploration of alignment, breath, vocal support and text. It works through a series of physical and vocal exercises before exploring approaches to the sorts of heightened text often used in ceremonies, culminating in individual readings.
Loose fitting, casual clothes are strongly recommended, since the session is quite physical.
Websites for the nervous and/or resistant (Hannah Hart / Andrew West)
If you know that you really should get yourself a website but don’t know where to start and/or keep putting it off, then rest assured that you are not alone. Even better, this workshop is just for you.
Andrew West and Hannah Hart will pool their technical and marketing skills to walk you through the whys and hows of setting up a BHA-hosted website, keeping the session practical and jargon-free. They’ll also point you in the direction of resources that will help you develop your website in the future, and aim to leave you feeling not only able to but positively enthusiastic about building a web presence to promote yourself as a celebrant.
This workshop will also be of use to those who have got a basic website set up (perhaps with a lot of help) and aren’t really sure what to do with it next…
What rites? Which passages? (Felicity Harvest)
We are rightly proud that no two of our ceremonies are the same – but just how different are we able to be? Most of us will from time to time have been asked to do something which is a bit different from our 3 standard ceremonies, be it a wedding tacked on to a naming or vice-versa, a bench dedication or a living wake. Just recently there has been discussion of other kinds of ceremony we might be asked to take – pet ceremonies, people who have recently completed a transgender process, divorce…. This workshop considers at how widely we might cast our boundaries, or how tightly we should draw them, how we retain quality and credibility if we are widening them, and how, if we want to be more varied in what we offer, we would market this. This workshop will also consider the work which has recently been done on “pre-need”, one of these new areas in which we have begun to look at codes of practice.
Working a Script (Ian Willox)
Celebrant Ian Willox, now in his fourth decade of teaching broadcasters and CEOs how to communicate effectively, will run a workshop on improving your script writing and reading. He’ll show how proper punctuation can be the enemy. Except in the case of poetry. He’ll reveal some of the tricks of the trade. He’ll troubleshoot – so bring a problem.
