Meet the Speakers
Look who’s joining us!
We’ve brought together a pretty remarkable group of death workers, and we can’t wait for you to meet them.
Meet Your Hosts:
DEBRA WHITE
Debra has spent more than 25 years as a high-performance coach, helping people turn meaningful ideas into clear decisions and practical action.
At Willow, she helps death workers build the practice around their work so it becomes clearer, more visible, and easier for people to understand, trust, and hire.
Together
Reena helps death workers turn what they know into meaningful ways to serve.
Debra helps them build the practice that brings that work into the world.
Together, they created The Death Worker Summit to show what is possible when the work itself and the business around it are finally part of the same conversation.
Meet Your Speakers
Christa Ovenell
Death Educator
Day 1
Beyond “Know Your Worth”: Pricing Deathwork
Get practical about what it really costs to provide your services and what sustainable pricing can look like.
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About Christa
Christa Ovenell is a licensed funeral director and embalmer, an end-of-life doula,
and founder of Death’s Apprentice Education & Planning. As a CBC radio columnist
and longtime death educator, she believes that death is part of life, so it’s time
we started treating it that way. She also knows that cemeteries make excellent classrooms!
Connect with Christa
Deanna Flores Cochran, RN
Founder, CareDoula® Education. Palliative Care Educator & Mentor to End-of-Life Doulas
Day 3
Live + Coaching: Build the Service That Sustains You Too
Learn how to shape a service around what you love, what you’re good at and the life and capacity you actually have.
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About Deanna
Deanna Flores Cochran, RN, is a pioneer in the end-of-life doula movement and founder of CareDoula® Education. For more than 26 years, she has worked alongside families, healthcare professionals, and non-medical advocates navigating advanced illness, the time before hospice, dying, death, and early bereavement. In 2010, Deanna founded the first End-of-Life Doula Certificate Program in the United States and has since trained and mentored thousands of people from diverse professional and personal backgrounds. She is a founding member and former Vice President of the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance and served as the first Chair of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s End-of-Life Doula Advisory Council. Deanna is also the author of the Amazon bestselling book Accompanying the Dying. Her work focuses particularly on the often-overlooked period before hospice, helping people develop the knowledge, judgment, and practical skills needed to reduce suffering and support families well.
Connect with Deanna
Lauren Seeley
Death & Grief Doula
Day 1
The Mosaic Practice: Pets, People, and Art
Explore the many ways you can build connections, grow your network and create opportunities to share your work in your community.
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About Lauren
Lauren Seeley is a Death & Grief Doula and a Creative Grief Workshop facilitator in the NYC area. She works with both animals and humans in the end-of-life and funeral space and is a death educator as well as a spiritual practitioner using creativity, art, ritual, ceremony, and Reiki as forms of healing in bereavement and loss. She is the facilitator of two mortality-based book clubs in NYC: Silent Book Club of Death NYC and Ahhsweetdeath Book Club, as well as head of NYC chapter of Bibliophiles Research Center. She partners with historical institutions such as The Met Cloisters, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Morbid Anatomy for her events.
Connect with Lauren
Kema Ward
Death & Grief Doula
Day 2
From Only Doula, to Known Doula
See the practical steps Kema used to build visibility, trust and paying clients in a community that didn’t yet know what a death doula was.
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About Kema
Kema Ward is a death doula, grief facilitator, and author based in Costa Rica, where she founded Carpe Mortem and The Unseen Mourning, a six-week grief group. She is the author of For My Beloveds and Where the Light Comes In, and her writing on grief and death has been featured on CNN, CNBC, and Tamron Hall. Her writing, teaching, and presence are devoted to a single truth: grief is not a problem to solve, it is a practice to return to, and when we tend it with intention and community, something shifts in us and in the people who come after us. Kema also trains other facilitators to carry this work into their own communities, and hosts Ask a Doula, a daily Live series on TikTok and Instagram.
Connect with Kema
Tracy Chalmers
End-of-Life Doula, End-of-Life Educator, Hospice Volunteer and Mentor, Forest Therapy Guide, Author
Day 2
Workshops as a Doorway to Connection and Growth
See how Tracy used public workshops to build trust, grow her reach and turn visibility into clients.
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About Tracy
Tracy Chalmers (she/her) is grateful and humbled to be living on the Coast Salish lands of the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2017, she co-founded the End-of-Life Doula Association of Canada and has since served as an end-of-life doula, educator, and forest therapy guide through her organization, Endwell. She is the author of The Nature of the Journey: A Trail Guide to Companioning Your Person on the End-of-Life Journey, a hospice volunteer and mentor, and has facilitated the End-of-Life Doula Care program at Douglas College. A friend to grief and death, and a servant to many, Tracy considers herself a perpetual student. She is of Norwegian, Swedish, Scottish, and English ancestry and cherishes her roles as mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend, listener, and lover of the natural world and all of life. Tracy offers this work with humility and gratitude, recognizing that it has been shaped and supported by the countless ancestors, teachers, and companions whose lives continue to light the way.
Connect with Tracy
Johanna Munson
Psychic Medium
Day 1
Your Calling Will Evolve. Let the Business Catch Up.
See how Johanna let her practice evolve alongside her, even when that meant reshaping the business she had built.
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About Johanna
Johanna Munson is a Psychic Medium and Intuitive Coach working with clients worldwide. Her business has evolved from advance care planning and end-of-life education into following her calling towards psychic mediumship. That evolution is the heart of what she teaches: that a practice can grow and change as its practitioner does. Johanna guides people to connect with those in their lives who have died, whether they are looking for relief from guilt or regrets, curious about their own capacity to connect, or just want to build a new way of approaching the mystery of life and death. Her sessions provide clients with renewed energy to move forward in their lives. Trained by renowned medium Suzanne Giesemann, she holds both the practical and the sacred in everything she offers, building work that honors her values and sustains the people she serves.
Connect with Johanna
Catherine Schaarwaechter
Death Doula, EOL Educator, Grief Guide, Mentor
Day 1
Caring & Charging - Money, Meaning & Self-Worth
Explore the relationship between money, worth and meaningful work, and what it can mean to build a practice that supports you too.
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About Catherine
Catherine Schaarwaechter is a Death Doula, End-of-Life Educator, Grief Guide, and Mentor based in Montreal. Her work is rooted in honest conversations about death, grief, and what it means to live and work with greater intention. Alongside accompanying individuals and families, Catherine mentors others working in the end-of-life field as they develop practices that feel both meaningful and sustainable. She is particularly interested in the often uncomfortable intersection of money, self-worth, service, and purpose, and in helping practitioners move beyond comparison and prescribed formulas to find ways of working and charging that are truly their own.
Connect with Catherine
Diane Button
Author, End-of-Life Doula
Day 2
Intake Conversations and Building a Doula Practice
Walk through the first client conversation, from intake form to initial call to first visit, and learn what to listen for along the way.
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About Diane
Diane Button is a founding partner of the Bay Area End-of-Life Doula Alliance in Northern California, an instructor in the End-of-Life Doula Certificate Program at the University of Vermont, and the best-selling author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living which she wrote for Maria Shriver's imprint The Open Field. She runs a non-profit foundation and holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Her thesis, The Components of a Meaningful Life, became the foundation for her life’s work helping people find greater meaning and peace in both life and death. Diane is co-author of The Doula Tool Kit: The Complete Practical Guide for End-of-Life Doulas, written with Angela Shook and Gabby Jimenez. Her work focuses on helping individuals and families navigate end of life with greater understanding, intention, and compassion. Her books and expertise have been featured on numerous programs and podcasts. Learn more at www.dianebutton.com.
Connect with Diane
Sandy Travis
Death Doula, Willow EOL Educator®
Day 3
How to Book your First Sponsored Workshop - Live Panel.
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About Sandy
Sandy is an end-of-life doula and co-founder of Life Transition Doulas, serving individuals and families throughout Central Texas. She is passionate about changing the way we think and talk about death—dispelling fear, normalizing conversations, and creating space for greater clarity and connection. Through Advance Care Planning, personalized guidance, and community education, Sandy helps people explore what matters most and make choices that reflect their values and wishes. She believes that preparing for life’s final transition can be an act of love—bringing greater dignity, peace, and understanding to individuals and those who care for them.
Connect with Sandy
T.J. Ford
Death Coach and Educator
Day 3
Pricing EOL Services: What to Charge and How to Say It
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About Teej
I am a death coach, educator, and doula. I work with people at all stages of living and dying, whether that involves helping them organize their death plans or sitting with them and their families when they are actively dying.
Connect with Teej
