Coffin Club is something different! We work together to provide funeral celebrant training and end of life planning empowerment.
Kate Tym (Blonde Kate) and Kate Dyer (Red-head Kate). We first met when we worked as Registrars for our local council. We jumped ship to become wedding celebrants and, after a short time, decided to train to conduct funerals – and so Kate and Kate Celebrants was born.
It didn’t take much time for us to become aware of how formulaic funerals tend to be and were so frustrated with the lack of choice and creativity being offered. Not only that, but we were amazed how little people knew about what was available to them for their final fling and how there seemed to be a reluctance from many in the funeral industry to make this information readily available.
Not ones to see a problem and not set about fixing it, our mission became to communicate and educate and bring the tricky topic of funerals out in the open. We started with a Coffin Club in our own area of Hastings on England’s south coast, before teaching other people to set up Coffin Clubs in their communities.
We started training other celebrants as we really see funeral celebrants as being key players in helping to change the face of funerals. We worked with other death professionals and, most importantly, brought our message to the general public by creating a uniquely informative plan-your-own funeral course.
We’d found our calling! People loved our approach and we’re really thrilled and grateful to have had our passion recognised with a trophy cabinet full of awards. We’re absolutely convinced that bringing death back to life is vital for better outcomes around grief recovery and resilience and, we couldn’t agree more with our inimitable patron, Miriam Margolyes, when she says, ‘Everyone who is going to die should come to Coffin Club.
Viva la Coffin Club revolution!!
Here’s some of the most frequently asked questions we get asked. If you’ve got any other questions, please do drop us a line, as we’d love to hear from you.
To find out if there’s a Coffin Club in your area have a look at our directory of clubs. If there isn’t a club near you and you would still like to plan your own funeral you could do that with our fabulous downloadable funeral-planning course. All the content of a Coffin Club course, but in a downloadable form. To find out more click HERE. Or, take the initiative and set up a Coffin Club in your area
Yes, we do! We are the ONLY organisation that encourages celebrants to work outside of the funeral-director-as gatekeeper model, market directly to their communities, serve the families they work with in a broader way and regain complete control over their careers. If you’re new to celebrancy and need training from scratch click HERE.
If you already work as a funeral celebrant but want to kick the funeral-director-as-gatekeeper model into touch, and work in a broader, more creative, way click HERE. We really believe that celebrants are key to changing the face of funerals – we love you guys!
Look no further than our Celebrant Directory. We only list celebrants who have undertaken our Celebrant-plus training and who work in a completely person-centred way. From a smaller, more traditional service to all bells-and-whistles, thinking outside the box (pun intended) our celebrants really can support you every step of the way
The Kates are only too happy to come and talk about Coffin Club and how to change the face of funerals forever. Please get in touch by filling in a speaker’s request form.
We work in partnership with Coffin in a Box, a brilliantly innovative Dutch company. To buy a Coffin from them, pop over to their website at www.Coffininabox.com
The Celebrant-plus course is a downloadable course that you work through in your own time; so it’s available for you to start any time you like. You get six modules of fabulous video content and an accompanying workbook and can work through it at your own pace.
Yes, we have a fabulous downloadable plan your own funeral course which has loads of brilliant fun and fantastically informative videos, an accompanying handbook and a funeral wish list that you work through to create your perfect send off.
This course covers every aspect of your end-of-life journey from registering your death, to what you’d like to happen to your body, to just how you’d like your final farewell to be.
So, don’t leave it ‘til you’re dead – plan ahead. Get your farewell event jotted down, give the information to whoever you’re leaving in charge and then get back on with living.
After feeling disheartened with the funeral profession, and my role as a celebrant within it, I started to educate myself on more diverse and inclusive ways of holding funeral ceremonies. I had seen Kate and Kate speak at an event about Coffin Club, but at that time funerals weren’t my focus. It was now time to revisit what they offered and I am so glad that I did. Not only did I meet the fabulous Kates again, I heard, and saw, their passion for offering Celebrant-plus funeral ceremonies. I was inspired and can definitly see that this is the way forward for me, and the profession. Thank you to my cohort for their sharing and open conversations and for Kate, Kate and Winnie for the laughs and knowledge.
‘I’m Sheron of SheronBurtYourCelebrant, based in Daventry Northamptonshire. I recently completed the
Coffin Club Celebrant-plus training. It was one of the best training courses I have been on to-date. It was so inspiring and thought-provoking! I’d finally found two women after my own heart, forward-thinking and paving the way for changes in the funeral industry. I was so frustrated with Funeral Directors’ way of thinking and working, I was literally losing the will to live (excuse the pun!), ready to throw the towel in, and then I heard Kate and Kate’s webinar and I thought “Now you’re talking”
I’m so excited about the future and I’m looking forward to moving forward and empowering change!’
