Why We Created the Center
The Center for Grief Education & Training was founded in 2026 by Andrea O'Reilly and Irish Dhindsa, two therapists whose professional paths first came together through their work at the Centre for Grief & Healing.
Through leadership, clinical practice, community outreach, supervision, volunteer development, and direct support of grieving people, they repeatedly encountered a need for professional grief education that moves beyond stages, timelines, and prescriptive models.
The Center grew from a shared commitment to understanding grief in its fuller context—including the ways loss is shaped by trauma, identity, culture, relationships, stigma, social context, and the losses a person may already be carrying.
Strengthening How Professionals Understand and Respond to Grief
Our mission is to support professionals across disciplines in developing a more nuanced, grief-literate, and trauma-informed understanding of loss — and to translate that understanding into thoughtful, compassionate practice.
We believe grief education must make room for complexity. This includes death and non-death loss, traumatic and stigmatized loss, relational trauma, cultural context, intersectionality, cumulative loss, and experiences that may be minimized or left unrecognized.
What Guides Our Work
Grief Beyond Stages and Timelines
We approach grief as a complex, individual, relational, and culturally shaped experience. Our education moves beyond universal sequences and assumptions about how grief should unfold.
Thoughtful, Practical Learning
We develop education that professionals can meaningfully bring into their work—structured enough to offer clarity, while preserving curiosity, reflection, and professional judgment.
Learning Across Disciplines
Grief appears in mental health, healthcare, education, spiritual care, community services, and many other professional settings. Our training welcomes professionals with different roles, experiences, and ways of supporting others.
Integrity in Development
We are building the Center carefully and transparently. We distinguish between what is established, what is informed by current knowledge and practice, and what continues to evolve through teaching, reflection, and participant feedback.
From Shared Experience
to Professional Education
Andrea and Irish worked together at the Centre for Grief & Healing during a period of extraordinary collective loss and disruption. Leading and supporting grief services through the COVID-19 pandemic brought greater visibility to the ways isolation, trauma, inequity, cultural context, and limited access to support can shape grief.
They also saw how frequently grief was reduced to stages, treated as a problem to resolve, or understood without sufficient attention to identity, relationships, culture, trauma, and the broader landscape of a person's life.
The Center grew from these experiences and from a shared belief that professionals need practical, relational, and context-sensitive ways of understanding and responding to grief.
Complementary Experience.
A Shared Commitment.
Andrea O'Reilly and Irish Dhindsa bring distinct but complementary perspectives to the Center's work.
Andrea contributes experience in organizational leadership, clinical supervision, grief and trauma practice, and work attentive to culture, identity, intersectionality, and complex, traumatic, and stigmatized loss.
Irish contributes extensive experience in community grief support, outreach, volunteer leadership, therapeutic arts, creative expression, and meaning-centred approaches to grief and trauma.
Their work is shaped by professional knowledge, lived experience, relational practice, and a shared commitment to grief education that makes room for complexity, culture, identity, creativity, and the full context of a person's life.
Founder & Executive Director
Andrea O'Reilly
MSW, RSW, CCTP, CGP
Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist
Andrea O'Reilly is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist with a particular interest in the intersection of grief and trauma. A former Executive Director of the Centre for Grief & Healing, she brings extensive experience in organizational leadership, clinical supervision, curriculum development, and supporting people through traumatic, stigmatized, and life-changing losses.
Her work considers how grief is shaped by identity, culture, relationships, stigma, intersectionality, and social context. Andrea is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and Certified Grief-Informed Professional. She earned her Master of Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University, where she received the Gold Medal for Academic Excellence in her graduating cohort.
Read Andrea's Full Bio
Director of Professional Development
Irish Dhindsa
RP, CCC
Registered Psychotherapist and Canadian Certified Counsellor
Irish Dhindsa is a Registered Psychotherapist, Canadian Certified Counsellor, and Certified Therapeutic Arts Practitioner with extensive experience supporting people through grief, trauma, and both death and non-death losses.
A former Outreach Coordinator and Volunteer Manager at the Centre for Grief & Healing, she brings together community support, volunteer leadership, lived experience, therapeutic arts, poetry, and meaning-centred practice. Her approach to professional education is relational, creative, reflective, and deeply respectful of the whole person.
Read Irish's Full Bio