Speaker Series: Bridge Building with the Dagara Community

• Monday, Dec 15 at 6:30 - 8:00 p.m

• Location: Online | Zoom

• Free | By Donation

Speaker Series Description:

This talk is part of the Speaker Series offered through the Grief Tender Mentorship Program — a six-month learning community focused on cultivating grounded, community-based grief ritual leadership. The program is guided by elders Thérèse Charvet and Laurence Cole and is now in its fifth year, with more than 150 alumni and 56 participants in the current cohort.

The Speaker Series offers a space for members of the mentorship program and the wider grief tending community to gather, learn, and strengthen our shared capacity to meet the grief of these times.

This series is designed for grief tenders with experience in Dagara-inspired grief ritual lineages and related teachings from Malidoma Somé, Sobonfu Somé, Laurence Cole, Thérèse Charvet, Francis Weller, and others. It is especially suited for those actively holding community grief spaces or deeply invested in supporting them.

Speaker Topic: Bridge Building with the Dagara Community

• Updates & learnings from the November trip to Burkina Faso

• Reciprocity and bridge building initiatives underway

Presenter: Coby Leibman

Coby Leibman (he/they) is a grief tender and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner with 25+ years of experience in ritual and ancestral healing. He’s been deeply involved in bridge-building between the Dagara community and grief tenders in the U.S., including raising $67,000 through the Sonder Project to build four wells in the Dagara homeland. His work integrates somatics, community ritual, and land-based ceremony to help people meet grief with depth and integrity.

Organizers:

Siena Tenisci, MA, LMHC (Senior Facilitator)

Siena Tenisci is a Senior Facilitator for the Grief Tending Mentorship Program and organizer of the Speaker Series. She is also a mother, therapist, and founder of Northwest Grief Tending, a practice dedicated to offering accessible grief rituals and supporting community-based healing.

Thérèse Charvet (Program Director & Guiding Elder)

Thérèse Charvet is the Program Director and a guiding elder for the Grief Tending Mentorship Program, and land steward of the forrest sanctuary Sacred Groves, where she has hosted grief rituals and retreats since 2002. She trained for many years with her mentor, the late Sobonfu Somé.

Laurence Cole (Lead Facilitator & Guiding Elder)

Laurence Cole is a lead facilitator and guiding elder for the Grief Tending Mentorship Program. A song elder and ritualist, he trained extensively with Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé and has supported grief rituals since the late 1990s. He joined the Sacred Groves grief retreat team in 2009 and continues to share ritual and group singing widely.

Grief Tender Mentoring Program Team

The program is supported by a core team of six members—Thérèse Charvet, Laurence Cole, Siena Tenisci, Alex Eisenburg, Jordan Lyon, and Sarah Jackson—along with 10+ program alumni serving as pod leaders and elders in training.

Questions? Please email Siena at nwgrieftending@gmail.com