The journey of grief & loss

Steve, I thought it would be great for us to talk about the whole experience and area of grief and loss together.

Because...

Just recently, you've lost and we've lost friends who've died.

But also really mindful that loss is it's not just when someone dies.

It takes many forms.

And the last conversation I had about this was today at 1130 in the office.

And then on Friday, I had a conversation where one of our leaders in education was asking me to go and do some training for 50-ish of our staff around this.

So it's a thing, isn't it, that's ever-present for all of us?

It's ever-present, you know, first of all, organisationally.

an organization, a movement the size of Oasis with over 6,000 staff now.

And then there's all the parents of kids in our schools and all the children that are in the schools and in our youth clubs and our housing projects, et cetera, et cetera.

And then there's Oasis work in other countries.

There are nine other countries that Oasis works in.

The reality is for a long time for me, I often say to people, grief and loss is part of every single day.

Yeah.

When you consider there's only 365 days in a year and there are, you know, somebody calculated a few years ago, I don't know how they did it, but they did a serious piece of work in Oasis that said we were in touch with the same hundred and I think it was 27,000 people every single day.

These people we actually knew rather than people we bumped into.

I'm sure it's more than that now.

But the truth is on every day someone's being born, someone's dying.

Someone's finding out that they have terminal cancer.

Somebody's finding out they have a serious illness.

Somebody's in an accident, et cetera, et cetera.

Somebody's celebrating a birthday.

Somebody's celebrating an anniversary.

somebody's on top of the world because their football team just, you know, won the FA Cup or something like that.