Solutions for Schools, Institutions & Community Groups
Preventive & Restorative Strategies
for Mental Health & Emotional Well-being
If resilience is your desired outcome,
response and recovery will get you there.
When it comes to mental health,
delays can be costly.
Don’t wait any longer.
Act decisively today to ensure optimal well-being!
A CRITICAL PIECE FOR MAINTAINING MENTAL HEALTH
Mental health is just starting to get the attention it deserves. Understanding loss and grief is a critical piece of the puzzle, because unresolved grief often leads to depression.
Whispering Hope provides a holistic framework for mental and emotional well-being that is sound and comprehensive, and yet easy for all stakeholders to understand.
A holistic 3R Blueprint® for Schools & Community Well-being
Whispering Hope’s proprietary 3R Blueprint® for Schools & Community well-being (Response > Recovery > Resilience) provides a sound and holistic framework to:
- Pre-emptively protect and enhance the well-being of students and educators (or, in the case of community groups and social service organisations: social workers and community volunteers)
- Prevent loss & grief from eroding mental health and well-being
- Pro-actively manage loss & grief before they snowball into bigger issues affecting well-being and human flourishing.
Our suite of comprehensive solutions include:
- Mental Health and Grief: Understanding the Critical Connection
- How Loss & Grief impact Mental Health
- First-Aid: First Responder Training for Emotional Well-being
- Crisis Response for Schools: Facilitating Safe Conversations for Students, Parents and Educators
- Comprehensive Community Support Program for Suicide Aftermath: Response, Recovery & Resilience
- Helping Children Grieve (A Program For Parents, Educators & Concerned Adults)
- Grief Sensitivity Training: Critical Skills for Educators, Leaders & Managers
- Grief Sensitivity Coaching for Leaders & Managers
- Grief Recovery Method® Program
With our track record and specialised expertise in grief counselling, consultancy and pastoral care, our team at Whispering Hope is well-positioned to serve your institution and community with empathy, discretion and sensitivity.
THE PROBLEM:
The hidden cost of grief
Grief often exacts an unseen and unheard burden on schools and community groups.
Loss and grief are part and parcel of life. When students and educators find themselves coping with major disruptions and crises in life, they struggle with loss and grief, impacting their well-being.
This can result in:
- Loss of enthusiasm and morale
- Disengagement
- Higher absenteeism
- Inability to focus on work
- Lowered productivity
- Poor physical, mental and emotional health
- Impaired decision-making
- Workplace and road accidents.
THE REALITY:
Grief: Not just death & bereavement
There are more than 40 major losses in life.
Those most commonly affecting schools and community groups include:
- Loss of Friends or Colleagues
- Suicide
- Failure & Disappointment (Loss of Opportunities / Preferred Future)
- Abuse (Loss of Trust, Safety & Security)
- Loss of Loved Ones
- Divorce & Break-ups
- Miscarriage & Stillbirth
- Health Losses
- Pet Losses.
Why is pre-emptive action necessary? Because unresolved grief simply doesn’t go away on its own. When left unresolved, it often spirals into depression. That’s why dealing with loss & grief is so critical for maintaining mental and emotional health.
Let us be your facilitator and guide as you take leadership in addressing and processing grief as a community.
CLIENTS IN EDUCATION & COMMUNITY SECTORS
ACADEMY OF PRINCIPALS
The professional body that brings together senior educators in Singapore
“DEFINITELY HELPFUL”
by Mrs Belinda Charles, Academy of Principals
“We invited Whispering Hope to speak to 40 principals on ‘Looking At The Whole Person’, to raise awareness and learn ways to journey with staff who may experience losses in life, which could affect their mental health and impact their work.
Principals attending the talk found the topic unusual and different, but definitely helpful. It alerted them to the need for well-being in different areas, not just about stress in the workplace.”
SILVER RIBBON SINGAPORE
A non-profit organisation focused on promoting mental health
“EXPERIENCED, HELPFUL, PRACTICAL”
by Ms Porsche Poh, Executive Director, Silver Ribbon Singapore
“I could tell that Whispering Hope is experienced in helping people out of grief. They gave very helpful insights about the common myths we usually believe about grief, and the practical things we can do to support our family and friends who are grieving.”
“Gracie Mak spoke as a panelist for our recent online forum on the topic, ‘Finding peace and stillness in the midst of disappointment and grief’. The session was conducted in Mandarin.
I look forward to collaborating with Whispering Hope to help more Singaporeans bounce back from grief and attain positive mental health.”
HOLLAND VILLAGE METHODIST CHURCH
A religious organisation
“COMPASSIONATE & INSIGHTFUL”
“Our Women’s Society of Christian Service (WSCS) committee is pleased to recommend Whispering Hope as a resource partner in equipping the church to be more compassionate.”
“We wanted to help our leaders and members understand the nature of loss, and how to extend compassion in times of loss. We did the session over Zoom and received great feedback from our participants! They found the session by Joan Swee of Whispering Hope helpful and insightful.
Our members now have a better understanding of loss, what the normal grief process looks like, what to say and what not to say — so as to better support those who go through life’s transitions and curved balls.”
Our experience with Whispering Hope
by Ms Shiao-Yin Kuik
Executive Director, Common Ground Civic Centre
Whispering Hope is doing much-needed work supporting people in the difficult work of acknowledging, accepting and moving forward healthily through losses. Whispering Hope's speciality in grief recovery is necessary not only for individuals, but for groups and organisations as well.
- Shiao-Yin Kuik
Citizen Circles: The River Valley High School tragedy
I worked with Joan and Gracie of Whispering Hope to co-facilitate ground-up online Citizen Circles to support anyone needing to process their feelings after the River Valley High tragedy.
Citizen Circles: On Pandemic Losses & Gains
I also collaborated with Whispering Hope to co-facilitate ‘What Happened To Us’ Citizen Circles for interfaith community leaders as well as corporate leaders & HR professionals needing safe spaces to process the multiple losses and gains they experienced under the pandemic.
Through Common Ground’s mission of creating whole communities, we believe that there is a need to create space for public conversations and support our citizens in processing and making sense of what happened to us before 2022 ends with pandemic restrictions lifting. In Singapore’s pandemic years, we believe that there have been many small and large losses that we might have barely begin to process. As we rush to embrace the endemic Next Normal, we may soon forget what we saw and learnt in that crisis season.
Through what we named as “citizen circles”, we wanted to:
- capture individual rich insights into what was lost, what are the emerging challenges and what are the new things that must be done,
- make sense of the emerging patterns from each of the demographic groups, and
- identify common patterns and experiences to help shift public conversation & perception.
Following up on that desire to hold space to process what happened to us, I first reached out to Common Ground’s resident partner, Whispering Hope, a grief consultancy, to explore what processing our gains and losses under the pandemic together could look like. Together, we kicked off the first two ‘What Happened To Us’ Citizen Circles in June and July 2022 for religious leaders and HR professionals respectively.
In the spirit of collaboration, this then led on to six other Citizen Circles in partnership with our other resident partners.”