Community Health Outreach

HONORING OUR LIVES: Advance Care Planning Conversations

Often we find our daily experience so busy that we don’t feel comfortable taking the time to reflect on it.  When something happens to us or to someone we care about, we are caught off guard and don’t know how to move forward.

“Honoring Our Lives” is Interfaith Community Services’ effort to provide the space and the tools for individuals and families to assess their lives, anticipate challenging circumstances that might arise, and begin making plans to adapt to new and potentially complex situations.  Such circumstances include accidents, serious illness, the natural process of aging, and the inevitable transition into death.  While we can’t avoid events or conditions that cause us stress or pain, we can strategize means of addressing and even transcending them.

Honoring Our Lives programming prepares people of all life stages and cultures transitioning through life stages and their departure from this life.
Advance care planning is a way to help insure that your values in life and wishes for care will be honored all the way through your life, if you are ever unable to speak for yourself.  Interfaith Community Services (ICS) offers FREE workshops to help people begin, continue or revise their advance care planning.

Click Here for a list of End of Life Care Resources

Topics

Attend ICS’s workshops to learn:

• About discerning and sharing what you value in life;
• Why deciding what kind of healthcare you want late in life is so important;
• How to talk to loved ones and healthcare professionals about what you want;
• How to document your decisions so your wants will be made known;
• How to revise and update any advance care plans you might have already.
• How to enhance your present by planning your future, then carry on with living!

Healthcare Planning Services

ICS’s services for addressing end-of-life opportunities include:

• Hands-on community workshops to equip participants to take action on end-of-life planning, such as affirming life values, having “the conversation” with one’s circle of support, and completing and filing advance care directives
• One-to-One coaching on determining one’s healthcare plans and completing the appropriate legal forms for end-of-life healthcare, which can be done in a person’s own home
• Trainings for leaders in faith communities and other organizations to be able to offer workshops for their constituents

For more information on these free workshops contact

Tandala Kidd, Health and Education Manager at 520-526-9311 or tkidd@icstucson.org
Karen MacDonald, Honoring Our Lives Lead Trainer at 520-526-9309 or kmacdonald@icstucson.org

ICS is proud to be a member of the End of Life Care Partnership, committed to helping us all embrace dying and death as part of life. Together we transform the end of life from a purely medical experience to a deeply human, spiritual experience.

ICS’s Honoring Our Lives Program offerings are made possible by:

The David and Lura Lovell Foundation & The Shaaron Kent Endowment Fund at the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona