In 2003, three women, Faith Davis, Shanti Green, and Karen van Vuuren, founded Natural Transitions as a non-profit organization. Their goal was to provide families with education and support to care for their own dead, at home, according to their beliefs and in as natural a way as possible (home funerals).

Karen van Vuuren became the organization’s executive director and led the non-profit into new areas of activity. This included offering workshops on natural death care, organizing national conferences, publishing a magazine called Natural Transitions, and co-founding The National Home Funeral Alliance.

When van Vuuren co-founded Colorado’s first holistic funeral home, The Natural Funeral, which opened its doors in 2019, she decided to retire the well-respected Magazine and put a temporary hold on her educational work with the non-profit. But in 2020, the idea of creating an online forum with an educational and community-building focus, held immense appeal. Van Vuuren has a background as a broadcast journalist, public speaker, and documentary-maker (Dying Wish – dyingwishmedia.com  and Go in Peace goinpeacefilm.org are her two hospice documentaries), so using media as a tool for education has long been her gig. Dying Wish is about a dying doctor’s decision to stop eating and drinking at end of life. Go In Peace is about caring for veterans with soul wounds (PTSD) at end of life.

Heather Massey is a founding board member of the National Home Funeral Alliance and a long-standing national and international natural death care educator and leading voice for holistic and natural choices. Based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, her private practice is Loving Hands. Heather is also active with the Funeral Consumers Alliance Massachusetts’ chapter.