This week on whiteballoon insights, we loved hearing from Dinah Liversidge who founded and runs the Celebrant Coaching and Training Academy. Dinah shares her reflections about the evolving role of funeral celebrants and offers guidance for anyone considering becoming one.
Q. What led you to becoming a celebrant and creating the Academy?
I took my first ceremony in 2009, and I think I knew within weeks that I’d found the work I was meant to do. I’d already spent years in coaching, training, and public speaking, so I had the skills, but celebrancy gave them a purpose that felt completely different.
The Academy itself came from a more specific frustration, though. When I trained, the course taught me how to write and deliver a ceremony, but nothing about how to run a business. I finished feeling genuinely abandoned, trained as a celebrant but with no idea how to build a sustainable career from it. I’d been running my own businesses since the 1990s, so I had something to fall back on, but I remember thinking clearly that without that background, I’d never have made a success of it. So when I started training others, I made sure business skills sat right alongside ceremony craft, not as an afterthought, but as something every new celebrant deserves from day one.
Q. Can you share with us a bit about the Academy and your ethos behind it?
A big part of my ethos comes from my own experience at school. I went to an incredibly academic school, and I was the bottom of a class full of high achievers, and that taught me something I’ve never forgotten: we all learn differently, and the right teacher, one who sees what you actually need rather than teaching to a generic standard, makes an enormous difference to what you take away. That shapes everything about how I train. I don’t believe in tick-box, one-size-fits-all teaching. Inclusion runs through it all; every student completes an Inclusion and Diversity module, because I want celebrants who can serve every family with genuine understanding.
The Celebrant Coaching and Training Academy is built on the belief that your voice matters, your lived experience matters, and your ability to empower others matters. I train people one-to-one and through self-paced programmes, and everything is NOCN-endorsed and CPD-accredited, but the accreditation isn’t really the heart of it. Empowering new celebrants is what drives everything I do.
Q. In your role as a funeral celebrant, can you tell us about your own particular style and the things that have inspired and influenced you along the way?
This is actually something I push back on gently in my own training. I don’t believe celebrants should have a personal style, because the ceremony was never meant to be about us. It should reflect the people we’re writing it for, not the person writing it. My language, tone, and approach shift completely depending on whose story I’m telling. A ceremony for a quiet, understated family will read nothing like one for a family who want humour threaded through every line. If my own style were showing through too strongly, I’d consider that a sign I hadn’t listened well enough.
What I do have is a niche, and that’s different from a style. I’m drawn to listening more than talking, and to finding the small, specific details that make a tribute unmistakably theirs rather than something that could be said about anyone. So if anything has influenced me, it’s the hundreds of families I’ve worked with, each one teaching me to set my own voice aside a little further and let theirs come through more clearly.
Q. The role of a funeral celebrant is so important and diverse. How do you see the role of funeral celebrancy evolving in the coming years?
I think we’re moving towards celebrants being a family’s first point of contact, rather than someone they only meet through a funeral director’s referral list. There’s a real strategic case for this: when families have already had a proper, facilitated conversation about their wishes before they’re in crisis, everything downstream becomes easier, for the family and for the funeral director too. I’ve been doing a lot of work in this space, including developing the Legacy Conversation Toolkit, which gives celebrants a way to offer families a free conversation about end-of-life wishes well before any service needs arranging.
I also think the profession will keep becoming more visible and more professionalised, with stronger standards, more robust training, and a clearer public understanding of what we can offer. Families are increasingly aware they have choice and increasingly want ceremonies that reflect modern life in all its diversity. Blended families, different faiths, non-traditional relationships, all deserve a send-off that honours them and provides what their loved ones need. Celebrants who can meet that with genuine skill and inclusivity will be the ones the profession needs most.
Q. What advice would you give to young people who are considering training as a funeral celebrant?
Come to it for the right reasons. This work will ask a great deal of you emotionally, and if you’re not doing it from a genuine place of wanting to serve families well, that will show. But if you do feel called to it, trust that calling.
I’d also say, don’t let your age hold you back, in either direction. It’s true that life experience often produces outstanding celebrants who come to this profession later in their career, after they’ve lived through enough of life’s milestones themselves to sit comfortably with other people’s. But young people bring something just as valuable: fresh perspective, comfort with how modern families and modern grief actually look, and an energy that this profession needs too. Whatever stage of life you’re at when you feel the pull towards this work, that’s the right stage to explore it.
Q. Taking time to re-charge is so important with the work that you do. Do you have any particular hobbies, or pastimes, that help you to unwind?
I live in a longhouse in a Welsh woodland with my husband John, so honestly, just being out among the trees does most of the work for me. There’s something about the woodland that puts everything back into proportion after an emotionally heavy week. John and I also run a small woodland retreat business together, so our personal and professional lives are quite beautifully tangled up in nature.
Beyond that, I have a soft spot for motorcycles, which surprises people sometimes. And I love a good slice of cake and a proper conversation, the unhurried kind where you deeply listen to each other. Those simple things, trees, the open road, good company, and something sweet, keep me steady.
I also ask my students to plan for their mental wellness and this is something many celebrants struggle with. We choose this work as we enjoy putting others first. We tend, on the flip side of this, to be pretty rubbish at looking after our own needs. This is not a role you can carry out on an empty tank and putting things in place to ensure you’re looking after yourself is vital.
Q. And finally, has there been a particular person or book that has inspired you along the way?
I think it’s fair to say my father-in-law, Alf has been a huge part of what inspired this journey. His was the very first funeral I wrote and delivered, with just a few days’ notice. And now, as part of my funeral celebrant training programme, I share his story with students for them to create a celebration of his life. When I created his funeral, I felt I had found a purpose that allowed me to use all the skills I had developed in my life for the benefit of others. It was a humbling experience and one that left such a profound impact on me that I knew that I was meant to do this work.
Thank you Dinah for sharing your story and these insights.
If you would like to find out more, please visit the Celebrant Coaching and Training Academy.