At her core, Kim Stravers is an eternal student of the eternal. She’s an aficionado of autonomy while remaining a person who thrives in community and collaboration—and she sees these traits as complementary rather than conflicting. She came to this work late in life, and all she has experienced and everyone she has been before this time have conspired to shape her into the unique presence she brings to this field. She has been a writer, a community organizer, a nonprofit cofounder, the director of a beers and blues festival, and a psychedelic facilitator. She has lived on the Eastern Seaboard, in the desert of the Southwest, and in the Sierra Nevada. She has been sister, daughter, niece, stepchild, friend, and honorary auntie to her human family; companion to beasts of four legs or fins, as well as to her sourdough starter, Clint Yeastwood; and steward to the land. When she is not performing deathwork, she may be editing an issue of an adventure sports magazine, tending to fermentation projects in her kitchen, moving her body in various joyful and challenging ways (often outdoors), or attempting the Sisyphean task of keeping current with her subscription to The New Yorker.
“Like many who are inspired to minister to the dying and bereaved, my call to this work came from experiencing several deaths very near to the most tender places of my heart. It began with losing my brother to a motor vehicle accident in 2017 and gathered full steam with the passing of my best friend from cancer three years later, though others filled the space between. More of my beloved dead, including my mother, have continued to pave my path into purpose since.
I serve because I believe death is a miracle. It’s an event common to every living being on the planet yet unique to each one. Through death, we connect to our natural environment, to our ancestors and descendants, to those we hold close, and to those we’ve never even met. To be invited into that most intimate space to bear witness and offer support as a death doula is an incredible privilege. It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly, and one I see myself fulfilling as long as my spirit and the vessel that contains it permit.”
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 Hospice of the Valley, Suncrest Hospice and Palliative Care, and the New Song Center for Grieving Children. 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.