Kim Stravers is an eternal student of the eternal. She came to this work late in life, and everything she has experienced, and everyone she has been before this time, has conspired to shape her into the unique presence she brings to this field. When she is not performing deathwork, she may be editing an issue of an adventure sports magazine.
Like many who are inspired to minister to the dying and bereaved, Kim’s calling to this work came from experiencing several deaths very near to her heart. She serves because she believes death is a miracle. Since her foundational training with INELDA in February 2020, she has undertaken continuing education with several national organizations, including Earth traditions as a certified death midwife, and InSight as a certified funeral celebrant, as well as with organizations in her own community, completing the Death Comadre curriculum offered by Cihuapactli Collective.
She’s a certified proficient death doula and after-death care coordinator with the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance, a member of the Arizona Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, and a volunteer with Suncrest Hospice and Palliative Care, the Living/Dying Project, and other local care-centered organizations. She has worked as a funeral attendant and celebrant for Dignity Memorial, and she offers healing in community as a founding member of the Patiloni Collective, which brings traditional folk medicine to the Valley of the Sun.
In expansion of how she envisions the delivery of deathcare, she is a graduate of SoundMind Institute’s psychedelic facilitator certificate program, has attended the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute’s End of Life and Existential Distress in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy experiential, and has completed End of Life Psychedelic Care’s core curriculum. She has been a guest speaker-educator on death and dying at the Arizona Adverse Childhood Experiences Consortium annual summit, the University of New Mexico’s virtual course on the Indigenous Mexican and Latin American practice of curanderismo, and the DreamCatchers Foundation and Boys and Girls Club of The Valley’s “Before I Die” capstone, as well as for other local and national groups. Regionally, in collaboration with Phoenix colleagues as well as Lee Webster’s The Funeral Partnership, she maintains the Arizona Funeral Resources and Education website, which provides comprehensive information about end-of-life options legally available to Arizona residents.