3 December 2025
LOCAL COMMUNITIES | CANBERRA, 2024
At Tender Funerals Canberra Region, a funeral is not a product, it is a rite of passage built by your community. General Manager Catherine Prosser describes their approach as “neutral and normal” – no assumptions, no pressure, just clear choices and time.
That sense of collective care is exactly what TFN supporters backed in Canberra in September 2024. Donor pledges kick-started Tender’s Pay It Forward Benevolent Fund, a funding pool that reduces costs for families in financial stress while keeping every funeral at cost. In the first year, 21 families who could not otherwise have afforded a meaningful funeral were supported. For their other families, not in hardship, their at-cost funeral price includes a contribution of $250, with some families choosing to donate even more – a quiet act of solidarity that keeps the fund turning over. Over time, Catherine expects a simple equilibrium to hold: roughly 80% contribute, 20 % receive. It is neighbourliness, formalised.
What changes when people are invited to take part? Pride, first. Catherine sees families walk out taller because they discovered they could do more than they thought. Confidence follows. When a community can witness, wash, carry, sing, or simply sit without being rushed, people stop spending energy trying to understand a confusing system and start spending it on what matters to them.
Catherine has a simple way of explaining why this works.
“Our brains are anticipation machines. We live as if what happened yesterday will happen today – two cups of coffee on the bench, Mum ringing at four. Death shatters those patterns, and grief is the slow work of retraining the brain. Meaningful, uninterrupted rituals help begin that reset.”
In this way, the ritual does not erase sadness, it lays a stronger foundation for tomorrow.
All of this sits inside a bigger cultural project: normalising death as community work. Tender’s team dresses smart-casual, asks plain questions, and keeps language human. Community talks run long because once people have the opportunity, they have a lot to say. A new annual picnic will bring families back to the same place where they farewelled loved ones, this time to swap stories and share food.
TFN’s role was to help the circle form faster. A year on, you can feel the difference in the rooms where people gather, the networks that show up, the kids who decorate a nameplate in their own handwriting and take it home after the cremation. When care is shared, grief changes shape – and a community remembers how to carry its dead, together.
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