Who We Are

Donna is the founder of Columbus Community Deathcare. She is an INELDA-trained Death Doula, home funeral guide, death educator and member of the National Home Funeral Alliance. She is a certified celebrant and has been officiating weddings and end-of-life ceremonies since 2005.

Donna has been drawn to death and dying since she was a girl growing up in Northern Ohio. Her most peaceful childhood memories include fort building, cornfield labyrinths and pet cemeteries. She was called to make this her life's work after the death of her father in 2014 and. received her formal training in April 2019.

   As a Death Doula, Donna offers guidance on how to care for our dying loved ones. She works to give families the tools they need to provide care up to and through the active-dying phase. She assists with bedside care, sits vigil, and facilitates open, honest conversations. 

For families interested in DIY deathcare she provides educational consultations on post-death body preparation, home funerals, natural/green burials, and offers guidance on how to bring creativity and deeper meaning to conventional services. 

Donna encourages everyone she meets to reimagine death and dying and while we’re waiting around for the end, she suggests we reflect on Mary Oliver’s query, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Tara is an educator and advocate whose professional career began in higher education teaching language and grew into the intersection of technology and education. At Ohio State University, she explores how teaching and learning work cognitively and in response to environment and stimulus in order to guide faculty in best practices for student engagement. 

Tara is originally from the end of a highway in rural Appalachia on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. It wasn't until she moved away for college that she discovered how death-averse the larger American culture was. Growing up, she experienced death as an intimate part of her life, both in its natural state as well as in the form of traumatic loss. 

Today, Tara is passionate about death education and reviving community-based deathcare practices in order to support greater equity in access, disrupt predatory exploitation of families at times of loss, and encourage a more open, healthy, supportive space around loss. Since moving to Columbus in 2009, she's  settled in comfortably and realized herself a buckeye with bluegrass roots. 

You'll find her leading workshops, helping with home funerals, and designing resources from merchandise to DIY guides. 

Vincent is a volunteer and death educator who works within the LGBTQ+ community to promote affirmative representation both during life and after.  During his residency at Sravasti Abbey, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the US, he was introduced to the concept of death preparedness and became passionate about dismantling taboos around impermanence in an effort to promote a more balanced view of life. 

As a queer, trans-masculine human, writer, and community activist, Vincent is dedicated to educating others about their rights and legal protections in death and dying and has aspirations to work with the aging population after finishing the nursing program at Columbus State Community College. 

Outside of this, Vincent enjoys hiking, reading, and playing with his cat.

Kyla is a volunteer intern at Columbus Community Deathcare. She's an environmental science major at Antioch College, studying the intersection of environmental health and deathcare. We are thrilled to have her with us this summer and we're already learning just as much from her as she is from us.

Living in close proximity to Glen Forest Natural Burial Cemetery, Kyla plans to focus her internship on the environmental benefits of natural, sustainable burial practices.

Join us in giving Kyla a warm welcome and stay tuned for her social media contributions and blog pos