Word: rafting
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Although the meetings make up the most prominent part of Life Raft, the organization also includes a "Network" of affiliates. The Network consists of 20 University officials. Most of these participants serve in some advisory capacity, whether as a doctor at University Health Services (UHS), as the dean of freshmen, a Harvard chaplain or as a counsellor at the Bureau of Study Counsel...
...Network members meet three or four times a year, but their primary purpose is to inform grieving students, faculty and staff members of Life Raft's existence and provide supplemental help. A Network member may refer students with religious concerns to the religious authorities of their denominations. If students have medical questions, the Network member may refer them to qualified physicians...
...group has received a great deal of support from President Bok and funding from the University, says Nadja Gould, the group's clinical supervisor and a UHS social worker. There are pamphlets about Life Raft in all of the Network offices as well as at the offices of Harvard's other counseling groups, such as Room 13 and Response. Bunn has written letters to senior tutors to tell them about the program and The Harvard Gazette announces the meetings each week. Reisz says, however, that "you can never publicize enough...
...Life Raft's weekly meetings follow no plan, nor do the discussions revolve only around death. "You need a place to go where you can just relax for a couple hours," the grad student says. "It's a place where you can cry or sit or can do whatever you want. We don't all talk about the person we've lost. We talk about our lives now, how our family situations have changed. I did not anticipate how much my family would change after the loss of one member...
...with many self-help groups, participants who arrive skeptical soon become comfortable as they come to know Life Raft's safe and undemanding atmosphere. The grad student says she has seen people brought to a meeting by a friend who, after being cautions at first, will "absolutely break down and find that the best thing they could possibly do was to let loose." When participants leave the meetings, she continues, "sometimes you feel relieved or sometimes you feel sadder than you did before...