May 12th, 2026

When Grief Gets Silenced: Supporting Black Youth & Families With Dr. Allen Lipscomb

Acknowledgment, validation, and curiosity – meeting grief with these three elements is crucial in creating supportive, culturally relevant grief support environments for children and adults. Dr. Allen Lipscomb has spent his career researching, designing, and implementing anti-racist interventions that directly support not just grief from death loss, but also the grief from racialized trauma experienced by those in the Black community. Dr. Lipscomb shares his personal experiences with grief, including the death of his grandmother when he was a child and being wrongly accused of a crime in his adolescence. He also discusses the roots of his work as a clinician, researcher, and Professor of Social Work, including the culturally specific ways he engages with clients that prioritize choice and naming racism and racialized trauma that play a role in how people grieve.