Designing Coffins at Kings Norton Beach

If you were able to join us on the 10th August at Kings Norton Beach you might have seen some children hard at work designing their own coffins.

A strange activity to take place on a sunny day on a beach in Birmingham you might think, but it was all thanks to the Northfield Community Partnership (NCP) and their wonderful team from the Northfield Neighbourhood Network Scheme (NNS).

The NCP team have set up and run the beach for a couple of years, but this year, with the launch of their NNS team they decided to include a Compassionate Community Marquee at the Beach and invited A Natural Undertaking along to encourage conversation and an understanding of choices available when someone dies.

Being a family event we naturally wanted to include people of all ages so got ourselves ready, prepared some coffin templates, printed some posters and produced some rather lovely stickers for our young designers …
 

Why involve young people?

During the day we had children join us ranging from age 1 through to early teens. Some children wanted to know what a coffin was, others just wanted to get down and dirty with the craft box. We only ever give information that children request, but what we hope is that by engaging in this activity the children will start to feel that death, and talking about it, is a natural part of life.

It will only ever be sad when at some point in their lives they are faced with the death of someone they care about, but at least we can help prepare children by ensuring they don’t feel scared to talk about it.

We were so pleased with the time and effort the children put into designing the coffins that we felt they deserved their own online galleries.