Best Practices in Home Funeral Education and Consulting

Oregon's current legislation regarding licensing anyone who, for a fee, leads workshops related to final arrangements is both a risk and an opportunity for home funeral advocates.

Obviously it is a risk in several ways:

• It infringes on free speech by requiring licensing for communications regarding funerals.
• It potentially obstructs the ability of families to acquire the knowledge, skills and support to direct their own funerals without a licensed provider.
  
• The language of the Oregon bill gives the funeral board the authority to establish the standards that death care consultants would have to meet. Because there is no provision for home funeral consultants to be on the board and because the board is predominantly peopled with funeral industry insiders, this is akin to having the fox guard the hen house.

But there are several opportunities as well:

• Home funeral educators and practitioners across the country are looking at events in Oregon and Colorado and realizing that they need to form supportive networks to be better prepared for hostile legislation that may be coming to other states.
• Home funeral advocates are beginning to appreciate the value of having a watchdog group backing them. Funeral Consumers Alliance too often is castigated for being too in-your-face and strident, but home funeral advocates in Oregon and Colorado are now seeing how important it is to work with a group that is skilled in legal and legislative advocacy on behalf of funeral consumers.
• This is a wake up call that home funeral advocates should begin a candid discussion about how to promote ethical practices in home funeral advocacy. We cannot wait for states to begin passing legislation to protect funeral consumers from unethical home funeral practitioners, who may eventually enter the picture if home funerals become more popular and home funeral consulting begins to become a more lucrative occupation. I'd like to see funeral consumer and home funeral advocates collaborate on a "best practices" model for home funeral education and consultative services.

With that last point in mind, I would love to hear from readers about what some of those "best practices" might look like. Perhaps we'd need to establish separate "best practices" for legislation and for home funeral practitioners, though there would be overlap. "Best practices" could relate not only to preparation for the field, but also the pricing of services and, perhaps, the regulation of home funerals.

It concerns me greatly that almost all states have funeral boards that are peopled with a majority of industry insiders. When boards that regulate funeral goods and services are dominated by industry insiders, the tendency is for them to focus on stifling competition and protecting turf, rather than their legislatively established purposes to protect consumers and the public health. Boards like Oregon's that are populated with a majority mix of funeral home, crematory and cemetery operators are going to tend to protect that mix from outside encroachments, including home funeral advocates. Boards like North Carolina's that are populated with a majority of funeral home operators specifically are additionally going to tend to protect funeral homes from outside encroachments including independent crematories. (Yes, I'm seeing that happen here.)

I don't think we're going to succeed anytime soon in making public members (those without any direct stake in commercial funeral goods and services) the majority on these state regulatory boards. But--I throw this out for consideration--what if home funeral practitioners modeled more appropriate oversight by developing their own council (albeit without the power to license or remove licenses that state boards have through their legislative authority), with a majority of public members? How about an 11 member Home Funeral Council in the U.S. that would be composed, say, of:

6 public members (the majority) having no direct stake in any commercial death care sector
2 home funeral educators or consultants (whether they earn a living from their work or not)
1 representative from the funeral home sector
1 representative from the independent crematory sector
1 representative from the commercial cemetery sector

What if, in turn, this voluntary national home funeral council developed:

• Criteria for accrediting (not licensing) professional home funeral practitioners and/or educators? The distinction is that licensure suggests a bar that must be met before one can engage in the practice at all; accreditation suggests a bar that must be met after some experience in the practice that shows certain levels of competency and/or knowledge and/or conformity with established ethical standards.
• Policies that would support the free speech rights of families and funeral consumer advocates when it comes to such things as workshops on consumer options in death care or literature on home funerals?
• Ethical standards for home funeral practice that discourages usury or other deceptive practices that could hurt families (AKA funeral consumers)? I don't think we have an issue presently with disreputable home funeral educators; on the contrary, I think they are as a group a very pro-family bunch. But the potential exists for charletans to enter this field if it is shown to be lucrative. How do we guard against abuse?

What do you think?