Soloss
The Context
Across 59 ethnographic stories of street-involved adults spending time in Edmonton’s inner city and south side between 2017-19, profound experiences of loss & grief were the common thread. Inadequately acknowledged losses, with little to no space for mourning, were often a catalyst to chronic crisis -- to repeated housing evictions, stalled addiction recovery, and relationship breakdown. And this was before the pandemic turned loss of life, work, rituals, freedom, and certainty into our collective realities.
Enter Soloss. Soloss is a network of Edmontonians legitimizing and destigmatizing loss and grief. By bearing witness to loss in all its forms and giving grief a concrete form -- as paintings, objects, songs, dances, meditations and stories -- Soloss seeks to foster a deep sense of respect, connectedness, and meaning.
Early prototyping evidence shows that when we pause to recognize loss, and mark the moment, together, as fellow humans -- not as professionals or experts -- we can start to bridge class, race and religious divides and lay the groundwork for individual and collective healing.
The Solution, In Brief
Soloss is community care for loss and grief, offering peer-to-peer support and the co-creation of individual and neighbourhood healing rituals.
The Problem it Addresses
Soloss addresses disenfranchised grief, recognizing that when loss & grief is minimized & sidelined, it can fuel depression, isolation, addiction, eviction, and further marginalization.
“Disenfranchised grief ... results when a person experiences a significant loss and the resultant grief is not openly acknowledged, socially validated or publicly mourned. In short, although the individual is experiencing a grief reaction, there is no social recognition that the person has a right to grieve or a claim for social sympathy or support.” - Kenneth Doka
Relation to RECOVER’s Wellbeing Framework
Underpinning Soloss is the belief that we, as fellow humans, are capable of responding to each other’s grief and connecting across lines of difference. We come from a plurality of rich traditions to help us journey through grief together; however, western culture has in many ways strayed from the traditions and rituals that nourish wellbeing as connection and interdependence.
Targeted Outcomes: Sharers and Losstenders experience greater sense of balance and connection to at least one of the six domains.
Tools/Levers: All the levers:
Frames & Narratives: Soloss brings disenfranchised grief and loss out into the open, shifting the storyline from one of isolation and shame to solidarity and healing.
Knowledge & Meanings: Soloss recognizes and draws on healing practices from across cultural, religious and disciplinary traditions.
Routines & Repertoires: Soloss creates healing artifacts and rituals at an individual and neighbourhood level.
Interactions & Environments: Soloss brokers horizontal, peer-to-peer relationships in people’s own natural environments.
Roles: Soloss values lived experiences of grief and loss, and offers flexible, paid work for individuals poorly served by the traditional labour market.
Incentives: Soloss works with social services and workplaces to reduce barriers to access and support widespread use.
What We Tried
A new paid role, hiring process, and virtual onboarding: We hired seven people into the role of Losstender (six paid and one volunteer), testing the framing and attractiveness for the role, hiring criteria, a week of onboarding interactions, 1:1 coaching, and a cohort support model. Our objective was to attract a diverse pool of applicants, learn what makes a good Losstender, for whom, and why, as well as what’s required to strengthen and monitor non-professionals in this role.
Recruitment methods and value propositions: We reached out to fellow Edmontonians experiencing grief and loss through pop-up plant stands in front of transit stations, at a social housing complex, and in a supermarket parking lot. We door knocked, ran a social media campaign, and connected with existing community & cultural groups in the Belvedere neighbourhood. The aim was to test five different value propositions, and learn how to bring grief and loss out into the open, as part of a visible public narrative.
Intercultural guidance: To deepen learning and community connection, we put together a Sounding Board of 11 Edmontonians with backgrounds in grief and loss and distinct knowledge traditions, professional roles, and perspectives. Sounding board members played the role of critical friend and relationship brokers, connecting directly with Losstenders to offer intercultural and interdisciplinary guidance, frameworks, and techniques.
Supporting tools & frameworks: To give Losstenders some grounding and practical support, we tested an online database of conversation and reflective prompts, community resources, and a notebook for recording observations and changes over time.
A visual identity and language: Because Soloss seeks to shift both personal and cultural narratives, we developed a distinct brand identity, visual language, and lexicon to transparently talk about grief and loss, in all of its textures and shades.
Who We Engaged
Over the 10-week experience prototype, from mid-February to April 2021, we deeply engaged 39 community members as Losstenders, Sharers, and Sounding Board Members and lightly engaged 300 community members through our hiring process, social media campaigns, recruitment pop-ups and door knocking.
What Changed
Soloss Theory of Change
Evaluative interviews with Losstenders and Sharers furnish early evidence for the Soloss theory of change, especially at the micro and meso levels.
At the micro level, both Losstenders and Sharers report that the process increased their sense of worth and afforded a greater sense of meaning and purpose. At the meso level, Losstenders reported shifting their attitudes and understanding of fellow Edmontonians, especially those living at the margins. Because of pandemic restrictions, we have not been able to fully test neighbourhood exhibitions and events, or measure longer-term shifts in the broader community narrative around grief, loss, and belonging.
What We’ve Learned
Prototypes are designed to test four elements: (1) attractiveness, (2) engagement, (3) impact, and (4) resourcing requirements. From this initial prototype, we believe Soloss is a promising intervention that can be taken forward to proof of concept and scale.
Attractiveness - The Losstender is an attractive role and employment opportunity that is a good fit for individuals facing barriers to employment, who might be experiencing long-term separation from the labour market.
Engagement - Soloss engages a wide range of population groups — from Indigenous community members to those in addiction recovery to refugees & immigrants to students to social service workers experiencing compassion fatigue and burnout. This last segment, social service workers, was a surprising finding.
Impact - Brief interventions like Soloss can be effective in fostering the conditions for healing. Our prototype supports a growing literature base on the efficacy of short, community-based interventions.
Resourcing Requirements - To operate Soloss, across at least three neighbourhoods a year, will require some backbone infrastructure. At least two staff roles -- a lead practitioner and a community coordinator -- are necessary, along with ongoing design & research support. We believe these roles should be supported by a partnership structure, bringing together stakeholders from the arts, healing, and social service sectors.
Value to Edmonton
Soloss is a timely intervention in the wake of a global crisis that has disrupted the way we live. It provokes a broader conversation about how we support each other through challenges to our mental health, but it is also designed to address a yawning gap in Edmonton’s pre-pandemic status quo. Alongside professional services, Soloss is a way to catalyze and support community-based responses to the most common of non-material challenges: loss.
(1) Soloss maximizes community resources.
Soloss builds on underutilized, existing community resources; sometimes even turning a perceived deficit into an asset:
People: Soloss hires diverse Edmontonians as Losstenders, not on the strength of their resumes, but based on how they have navigated their most difficult losses. Losstenders included discouraged workers and under-employed artists who reported that Soloss built their self-confidence, opened up new career directions, and helped them to make connections across cultural and class differences for the first time.
Infrastructure: Soloss has discussed partnership with Edmonton Public Library to bring Losstending into libraries to use their fantastic spaces and equipment for making and moving! It also uses parks and post pandemic, other community spaces.
Social service complement: Many of the individuals engaged through Soloss are clients of social support programs, such as addiction and housing services. Soloss allowed them to build bridges to community, establish their own healing practices, and bring family, friends, and support staff around them to commemorate their grief and healing.
(2) Soloss is an exemplary model of community care.
Soloss is an example of a distinct, but lacking, piece of social infrastructure. Sounding Board member and PhD candidate Salima Versi, a psychotherapist and a Canadian Certified Counsellor with a master’s degree in Counselling Psychology, sees Soloss as a great model of what community care can look like. Versi argues that professional services cannot replace the value of community care and support. Optimally, she argues, counselling clients would all have access to the experience Soloss offers, which reinforces organic ties to place and culture, through a common human experience.
(3) Soloss works systemically to shift outcomes at the level of culture and community.
Soloss aims to introduce new conversations and understandings of grief & loss among Edmontonians, strengthen the capacity of communities to respond to individual and collective loss when it happens (upstream), and shift systems’ practices, policies, and resource flows to more effectively support the resilience of citizens experiencing loss.
Where to From Here
To take Soloss forward, we are looking to...
Build a partnership governance model, with anchor organizations from social services, the arts, and the healing sector.
Secure the resources to grow Soloss over the next three years, to operate in at least nine neighbourhoods. Operating costs for Soloss are estimated around $275K a year, enabling 24 Losstenders to be hired and 250+ community members to be engaged.
Invest in the backbone systems, tools, and website necessary for Soloss to operate at scale, and be a replicable model in other jurisdictions. Start-up costs are estimated around $50K, and over three years, we believe cost recovery is likely through a monetization strategy including workshops, paid newsletters and training offers.
You can learn more about Soloss here. This is a page that was created by InWithForward, the social design firm that is co-leading the work with REACH Edmonton.