Values, Wishes, and Intentions

Dr. Tashel Bordere, Jacqueline Boyd, and Dr. Kate Grossman provides an overview of various aspects of end-of-life planning and strategies for people of color and LGBTQ+ folks to avoid missed opportunities to complete an advance directive, to receive palliative care, or to learn that hospice care is part of a toolkit for peaceful transitions. What are the main barriers to having end-of-life conversations with our loved ones, clients and diverse communities? For those perpetually in survival mode, what are the small steps to prepare for death and dying and how can they be facilitated?

Please note that Dr. Naheed Dosani is unable to participate in this event due to unforeseen circumstances.

Speakers

Tashel Bordere

Tashel Bordere, PhD. (she/her) has spent years researching the grief experience of black youth affected by homicide and gun violence. While many grieving people can relate to their grief being disregarded, for black youth and youth with marginalized identities, their grief not only goes unacknowledged, but is often penalized. Their behaviors and reactions, which are normal responses to grief, are met not with support and understanding, but with negative labels and punishment. This results in a concept Dr. Bordere has identified as suffocated grief and is rooted in systems of oppression and discrimination. Dr. Bordere, PhD, CT is a Certified Thanatologist and grant funded researcher at the Center for Family Policy and Research at the University of Missouri. She is also a past Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Forward Promise Fellow and the author of numerous research papers and publications focused on black youth affected by homicide, gun violence, and race-based trauma. She is the co-editor of the Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief (Routledge, 2016)

Jacqueline Boyd

Jacqueline Boyd (she/her) is a passionate LGBTQ+ advocate with over 15 years of expertise in senior care. She built the country's premier LGBTQ+ centered care management company. The Care Plan’s ground-breaking model of client-directed care provides advocacy, care navigation and advance planning for successful aging experiences. Simultaneously, the company supplies training, strategic planning and infrastructural support to nonprofits, businesses and community groups across the US. At the helm of The Care Plan’s leadership, Jacqueline has consulted with national and local organizations such as SAGE, Diverse Elders Coalition, and AIDS Foundation Chicago to enhance services offered to LGBTQ+ older adults. She is a sought after speaker and author providing business leadership through presentations at the American Society on Aging National Conference, Creating Change Conference, the Los Angeles County Older Adult Summit, and University of Chicago among others. She recently contributed a chapter to Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Health and Aging, available from Springer Publishing and authored the guide Create Your Care Plan: An LGBT Person’s Guide To Preparing For Medical Procedures. Currently Jacqueline serves as the co-chair of One Roof Chicago, an intergenerational LGBTQ+ focused housing project. She is on the advisory council of Pride Action Tank and co-founder of Project Fierce Chicago. www.the-care-plan.com

Dr. Kate Grossman

Dr. Kate Grossman is a Pulmonary & Critical Care Physician where she also serves as Chief of the Department of Medicine. She is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. She attended medical school at the State University of New York - Downstate Medical Center. She completed both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics Residency at the University of Chicago followed by Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Naheed Dosani

As a palliative care physician and health justice activist, Naheed Dosani, MD (he/him) is dedicated to advancing equitable access to health care for people experiencing homelessness and marginalization. These efforts include founding Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless (PEACH) and serving as Medical Director for a regional COVID-19 Isolation/Housing Program in the Toronto area. Dr. Dosani shares his passion for health equity through education and advocacy efforts that include media, public speaking, social media and faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. Dr. Dosani's research interests include care models for people experiencing homelessness and access to palliative care among culturally diverse communities. His research also includes interventions to facilitate greater appreciation and uptake of palliative care services in South Asian populations. @NaheedD

About Table Talk

We recognize that marginalized communities and cultures -- Black, Indigenous, Latino/a/x, Asian American, Disabled, LGBTQ+, etc. -- have their own unique perspectives and shared truths. All of these groups face tremendous challenges in dealing with serious illness, dying, grief, discrimination. And there is a shared need for platforms to talk about these issues freely in order to connect, learn, heal, remember, and take action.

While individual Table Talks are developed by and for specific communities, we recognize that often these groupings are permeable. Many of us describe more than one group as “home,” and many of us have experienced oppression based on multiple aspects of our intersecting identities: race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and more.

Reimagine invites people of all backgrounds to join us to witness, listen and learn at Table Talk. Ultimately we are creating space rooted in the principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion in order for everyone to thrive.

Table Talk is made possible with support from the Fetzer Institute and the John and Wauna Harman Foundation.

“How do you live without your mother?” is the unbearable question Judith asks twice in her film: as a daughter caring for her terminally ill mother and as an “old new mom”, single parenting her much-longed-for adopted baby girl at 50+. With gallows humor and lots of heart, this multigenerational love story ultimately asks: what do we really need to leave our children?

The event will provide an opportunity for everyone to take loving steps towards a “stuff review” in anticipation of Thanksgiving. By assessing objects, clothing, photos, documents, files, and more, we hope to inspire critical conversations about life, death and what we really want to leave our loved ones. This workshop will start with a screening of Judith’s 10-minute New York Times/Op-Doc, followed by a pragmatic and mindful discussion using prompts and writing. Can you start with your grandma’s most cherished ‘tchotchkes’ and use the conversation and connection and stories about the stuff to get to the DNR (do not resuscitate) order? We think so.

Judith Helfand

Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand is best known for her unique voice as a first-person filmmaker. She has taken on the dark worlds of chemical exposure, corporate malfeasance, environmental injustice, the climate crisis, the long-term impact of structural racism colliding with the politics of disaster and disaster preparedness. In Love & Stuff she delves into deep grief and parenting. Her uncanny gift of marrying dark humor with transparency when addressing serious issues, makes them as personal as they are universal, as resonant as they are entertaining.

Her films include The Uprising of ’34 (co-directed with esteemed veteran George Stoney), her groundbreaking personal film A Healthy Baby Girl, its Sundance award-winning sequel Blue Vinyl, followed by Everything’s Cool (both co-directed with Daniel B. Gold) and her incredibly prescient feature Cooked: Survival By Zip Code which she produced with Kartemquin Films and was broadcast on Independent Lens in 2020. Three of her award-winning films made their world premieres at Sundance, and all have been nationally broadcast on PBS/POV/Independent Lens, HBO, and The Sundance Channel.

A committed field-builder, Helfand co-founded Working Films in 1999, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using nonfiction storytelling to increase civic engagement and promote environmental and racial justice at the local, state, and national levels. In 2005, she co-founded Chicken & Egg Pictures, created to support women documentary filmmakers at critical stages in their careers with creative mentorship and community building matched with strategically timed funding. She now serves as a Senior Creative Consultant and co-runs the (Egg)celerator Lab, a year-long creative mentorship program for first and second time feature documentary directors. As part of her early work at Chicken & Egg Pictures Helfand was a producer on the 2012 Oscar® nominated short The Barber of Birmingham and an executive producer on The Forest for the Trees, Orgasm Inc, Brooklyn Castle, Semper Fi: Ever Faithful. In 1997, Helfand received a Peabody Award for her film A Healthy Baby Girl which had its world premiere at Sundance and was broadcast nationally on POV. In 2002, her film Blue Vinyl -- the "world's first toxic comedy" – had its world premiere at Sundance where it launched a precedent setting multi-year engagement campaign and was nominated for two Emmy Awards.

In 2007, she received a United States Artist Fellowship. In 2016, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch and in 2019, she was awarded the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s 2019 Freedom of Expression Award.

She taught documentary production at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts for seven years, was the 2007/2008 Environmental Filmmaker in Residence at UW Madison where she co-created a production class focused on environmental filmmaking and an engagement class built around a local environmental film festival. In 2020, she was the Bob Allison (Allesee) Endowed Chair in Media at Wayne State University’s Department of Communications, part of the adjunct faculty at SVA’s Social Documentary Program, and has just completed a two-year visiting professorship at Columbia University's Journalism School teaching emerging visual journalists. In fact the short film paired with LOVE & STUFF for this broadcast, Call Me Anytime I'm Not Leaving the House, was created in Helfand's Spring class the "Art and craft of documentary, by emerging filmmaker Sanjna Selva.

Deeply committed to mentorship and passing it forward, Helfand is recognized by many in the broadcast documentary field as "one of the best pitch trainers out there" and has done intensive training, program design and moderation for Chicken & Egg Pictures' live/virtual pitch events, The Athena Film Festival's Work-in-Progress Program, The Double Exposure Film Festival's PITCH forum for emerging visual journalists, and has just co-designed and launched the Jewish Film Institute's first ever storytelling intensive/pitching forum, Pitch & Kvell. Helfand is currently working on a range of projects, including the audience engagement campaign that is being launched in step with Love & Stuff, about the importance of processing grief in community with others face to face and heart to heart. She lives in NYC with her daughter Theo (who is now eight) and their pet house bunny Coco Knugel. www.judithhelfand.com

Aditi Sethi, MD – founder of the Center for Conscious Living and Dying (CCLD) – and Hannah Fowler, RN – Director of Education at CCLD – lead a conversation on communal caregiving at the bedside. Aditi and Hannah – both end-of-life doulas – will also share a work-in-progress sneak peek of the documentary The Last Ecstatic Days to be released in 2023. Aditi is featured in the film and Hannah is the film's impact producer. This is event is co-hosted with The Completed Life Initiative.

At the height of the pandemic a young man named Ethan Sisser sat alone in his hospital room. Afflicted with brain cancer, he began documenting his agonizing journey on social media. Around the globe thousands of people celebrated Ethan’s unflinching courage, charismatic vitality and empowering ruminations, but he envisioned more - to make a movie about the ineffable beauty of leaving the body. Inspired by Ethan, a devoted team of death workers that included Aditi Sethi, transported him to a quiet house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. What unfolded in Ethan’s final weeks is an intimate story that has never been told before: how a community came together to help a dying man find healing through release.

Hannah Fowler, RN

Hannah Fowler is a hospice nurse, end-of-life doula, facilitator and educator who brings conscious living and dying practices to individuals and organizations around the world. She is the Director of Education & Engagement for the Center of Conscious Living and Dying in Asheville, North Carolina and faculty with the Conscious Dying Institute, and serves on the advisory board of the Completed Life Initiative. Hannah has presented for the Centre for Death and Society, Redesigning Deathcare and the National End of Life Doula Alliance, and has been featured on podcasts including the Best Life Best Death. Through trainings, workshops, and grief rituals, Hannah teaches how awareness of death goes beyond honoring our last act of living and allows us to open to the mystery of life itself. Prior to deathcare work, Hannah was the Director of the Intensive Outpatient Psychotherapy Unit at the Lower Keys Medical Center and an ICU step-down nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Hannah is certified in energetic trauma release and healing touch.

Aditi Sethi, MD

Aditi Sethi is a hospice and palliative care physician, end of life doula, musician and executive director of the Center for Conscious Living & Dying, Inc. Aditi is an emerging and important voice for shifting our culture’s understanding and approach to dying, death, and bereavement care.