Grief at Work: Making Room for the Whole Human

Grief comes to work with us. Most workplaces still treat it as private, something to get through fast and alone. People feel unseen, colleagues freeze because they don’t know what to say, and sometimes good people leave.

This lunchtime panel is a space to talk about it openly. We’ll explore why grief is so hard to name at work, what meaningful support looks like, and how each of us can make it a little less taboo.

Grief is welcome here. Come as you are.

Why attend

Sooner or later, most of us will grieve while working, or work beside someone who is.

Hear an author, a coach and two founders speak candidly about grief at work, and bring your own questions.

Leave with practical ideas you can use the next day, with your team or for yourself.

Who it’s for

Employees in full-time roles

Managers and team leads

HR and people leaders

Founders and business owners

Anyone navigating a loss right now

What you’ll get

Shared language for talking about grief at work

Simple ways to show up for a grieving colleague, or for yourself

A clearer picture of what real support from managers and organizations looks like

A new perspective on bringing your whole self to work

Your panelists

Patricia Bravo, founder of the consulting firm Bravo For You and author of In the Room: When Grief Comes to Work. An organizational development strategist, Patricia focuses on workplace empathy, leadership development and grief literacy. She helps leaders, teams and organizations recognize and respond to the personal losses people bring to work, and the professional losses that happen inside organizations.

Colleen Coleman, founder and CEO of Celebration of Life Studios, where we're changing the Western narrative on dying and grief. She is a psychic medium, grief advocate, trained end-of-life doula and thanatologist candidate completing her MS in Thanatology. After a 20-year corporate career, her father's death sent her looking for a better way to grieve, and what she found became her life's work. She works with the women who handled everything: the funeral, the estate, back at work Monday. In October 2026 she produced Celebration of Life Seattle at Pier 70, the first event of its kind in the world.

Sally Revell, executive coach and founder of GenerativeHuman.ai, coaching for AI transformation leaders, and founder of The SWELL Incubator, a women’s founder community. After losing both parents in 2024 and leaving her CMO-level corporate tech identity behind, Sally’s own experience of grief at work led her to live from her values and help others do the same.

Carol S. Grant, founder of Opolo, native ed tech platform that delivers homework support to neurodiverse middle and high schoolers. She is also a go-to-market strategist and advisor with over twenty years of experience leading go-to-market strategies across Microsoft, Zillow, venture-backed SaaS, and PE-backed businesses in transformation. Carol is also navigating grief on multiple dimensions: the loss of her mom last April after a four-year battle with lung cancer, and a corporate career which she transitioned from this past spring after 25 years, going from an identity of corporate executive to the uncertainty of founding an ed tech company. Carol also founded and leads Agency in Motion, which delivers go-to-market and AI upskilling for women entrepreneurs.

Moderated by Amanda Baker, leadership coach and founder of Collaborative Sage. Amanda brings trust-building advisory, workshops and coaching to leaders and teams. Her work in compassionate adult learning spans the Peace Corps, nonprofits and global corporations. Along the way, she has bridged heart and mind to make workplaces more human, and helped leaders influence with confidence in their own voice.