Four minute read
The Good Funeral Guide, founded in 2008, champions choice, transparency and creative approaches to funerals. We spoke to CEO Fran Hall about the story so far, exciting plans for the future and how you can get involved.
How did the Good Funeral Guide begin?
It started with a celebrant, Charles Cowling, who observed what was going on in the world of funerals. He saw how it was dominated by big corporate interests, and how other organisations, like the Natural Death Centre, were left on the fringes.
Charles had strong opinions about what a good funeral was, and how people could achieve it. So, he set up a website and a blog — the Good Funeral Guide. He modelled it on publications like the Good School Guide and the Good Beer Guide which focused on consumer experience.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it from an insider, working in the funeral sector. The blog brought people together — progressive funeral directors and practitioners who wanted to see change.
This led to a book; the transition to a Community Interest Company in 2011; and to the accreditation scheme, which we continue today, where progressive and emotionally intelligent funeral directors, like Poppy’s, can differentiate themselves from the run-of-the-mill companies around them by going through our rigorous accreditation process.
How did you get involved with the Good Funeral Guide?
In 2008, I was working in natural burial, running natural burial grounds. I remember coming across the Good Funeral Guide website and thinking, ‘Wow, this is really interesting’.
By 2015, Charles had decided to step away from the world of death and funerals. But he struggled to find someone to take over the Good Funeral Guide and was about to close it down. I'd known Charles for some time by then, and I suddenly found myself available. So, I thought, ‘Right, well, I'll see if I can keep it going’.
Now, I work alongside executive directors Jane [Morgan] and Isabel [Russo], who are both celebrants and amazing ritual designers.
So, how would you describe a ‘good’ funeral?
One where people leave the funeral ceremony feeling like they've done a good job. Not just the people that they've employed to do the funeral for them — they have co-created something which is appropriate and fitting, and right for the person who died.
There’s a liminal time between when somebody dies and the funeral, when people will move through different emotional states and experiences.
Once somebody dies, life is irrevocably changed, depending on who that person was and what they meant to you. The funeral is a point on your journey into the rest of your life without them, and a good funeral can be transformative.
Tell us about some of the changes you’ve been involved in at the Good Funeral Guide.
Charles was always very confrontational and challenging, and rightly so — part of the role of the Good Funeral Guide is to call out poor practice where we see it.
However, we need to reach people everywhere, so we’ve moved towards enhancing the positive rather than pointing out the negative. We hope this is more beneficial to more people.
One example was the photo shoot which we organised, showing different kinds of funerals. We were sick of seeing always pictures of miserable-looking men with a veneer coffin on their shoulders whenever there was a newspaper article about funerals. We wanted to let people know that you could do something different.
Since then, we've had millions of views of our images on Unsplash and they have been used all over the world. We want to see more things like that out there, so that people can know what’s possible and be inspired.
You can read more about the achievements, including campaigning work and policy influencing, of the Good Funeral Guide here.
What’s next on the agenda for the Good Funeral Guide? And how can people support your work?
Right now, we're ticking over. We have generous supporters - we're funded by donations, the accreditation process and the Good Funeral Guild. We've never taken advertising and we never will. We've also never had any kind of investment funding.
We're fiercely and ferociously independent. But that constrains us because it limits the amount of income that we have coming in.
We want to do more – to work with government; to continue campaigning for better funerals; and to hold and subsidise creative events to help people understand how a good funeral makes a difference.
Through artistic and creative routes, we can reach more people to engage and to talk about this difficult subject. But all that needs income.
Support the Good Funeral Guide crowdfunder here.
I think that society is edging into a more mature way of dealing with talking about death. But we are seeing a rise in the aggressive marketing of direct cremation, rather than offering this as part of a range of choices, and there are still a large number of people from a generation where death was not something that you talked about.
If we can make talking about death a greater part of the general conversation, more of a casual thing, that would be massive. I'd go to my grave happy thinking I'd been helped to make that happen.
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Image credit: Good Funeral Guide