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FEBRUARY 2013
FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS
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Bob Arrington
FUNERAL DIRECTOR
“My interest in funeral service began at a young age,
and I have many mentors to thank for that. Among
them was my childhood neighbor, Ralph Jones, who owned the local
funeral home. After my grandmother’s death, I began visiting Mr. Jones
each day at the funeral home after school. From there my passion
for funeral service started. Mr. Jones and others opened my eyes to
the opportunity to have a servant’s heart when assisting families during
their most difficult times of loss.
I want to show others the tremendous opportunity that exists in this profession, and
the Funeral Service Foundation allows me to do that. Supporting the Funeral Service
Foundation is my way of giving back to a profession I love, and encouraging others to
join me in it.”
Bob Arrington
Arrington Funeral Group, Jackson,TN
$10,000 Donor
Tennessee State Honor FundVolunteer Fundraiser
Mount Ida College hosts Woodrow
Wilson Visiting Fellow Mark Harris
Mark Harris
NEWTON,MA—
Mount Ida College
hosted
Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow
Mark Har-
ris
, an internationally renowned authority on
the “green burial” movement and the mod-
ern funeral industry, for an intensive week-
long visit on November 26-30, 2012. Harris
taught classes, seminars, workshops, and was
the featured speaker for the annual Wadsworth
Distinguished Lecture Series. Harris also met
with students and faculty members informal-
ly throughout the week to share his practical
knowledge in the areas of green burials, green
building and environmental
journalism.
“We were very excited to
have our first Woodrow Wil-
son Visiting Fellow at Mount
Ida College, an honor typi-
cally reserved for much larger
institutions. Mark Harris is a
great fit for us as
New Eng-
land Institute
at Mount Ida
is one of the nation’s leading
funeral home management
and funeral service schools,”
stated
Barry Brown
, Presi-
dent, Mount Ida College.
Brown added, “Our stu-
dents had a chance to meet a world-class en-
vironmentalist and green burial expert with
a deep knowledge of death and dying issues.
We’re delighted that Mark Harris was in resi-
dence allowing him to get to know our campus
and our students and to explore in depth how
the classroom and campus relate to the broader
society.”
Harris was also the featured speaker at the an-
nual Wadsworth Distinguished Lecture Series
onWednesday, November 28, 2012 at the au-
ditorium in Carlson Hall. The lecture, based
on his book
Grave Matters: A Journey through
the Modern Funeral Industry to a NaturalWay of
Burial
, is an engaging visual tour of this coun-
try’s growing green burial movement, includ-
ing the green cemetery that Harris helped es-
tablish in his Pennsylvania hometown.
Harris is an award-winning journalist and a
former environmental columnist with the Los
Angeles Times Syndicate, and is a recognized
authority on the “green burial” movement and
the modern funeral industry. His book has
been called the “manifesto of the green burial
movement.” More recently, Harris has worked
with the board of an established cemetery to
create
GreenMeadows
, the first natural burial
ground in east-central Pennsylvania.
Harris has keynoted numerous conferenc-
es on funeral rights, home funerals and green
burial. Harris speaks regularly to college stu-
dents, hospice workers, church groups, funer-
al consumer advocates, and funeral directors,
among others. An adjunct professor of writing
at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, Harris
has also given presentations on the art and craft
of environmental journalism. Harris is current-
ly writing a book that follows
the construction of one of the
greenest and senior-friendly
homes in the state of Georgia.
The Woodrow Wilson Vis-
iting Fellows program, which
is administered by the Coun-
cil of Independent Colleges
(CIC) in Washington, DC,
brings prominent artists, dip-
lomats, journalists, business
leaders, and other profession-
als to campuses across the
United States for a week-long
residential program of classes,
seminars, workshops, lectures,
and informal discussions. For 35 years, the Vis-
iting Fellows have been introducing students
and faculty members at liberal arts colleges to a
wide range of perspectives on life, society, com-
munity, and achievement.
TheWadsworth Distinguished Lecture Series
was established in 1990 to engage prominent
individuals to provide lectures on selected top-
ics to theMount Ida community and the com-
munity-at-large. The series is named after dear
friends of the college, the late
William Steele
Wadsworth
, a member of the board of over-
seers of the college, and his wife the late
Arline
Graham Wadsworth
, an alumna of the class
of 1920. PreviousWadsworth Lecture speakers
include
Arthur R. Miller, Andrew Card
and
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr
., to name a few.
Mount Ida College is a small New England
private, co-educational undergraduate and
graduate institution located nearby Boston
in Newton, MA that offers its approximately
1,400 full and part time students a strong ca-
reer focused and liberal arts education. To learn
more about Mount Ida College, visit www.
NEWS
Educational
HOUSTON,TX—
Service Corporation International
(SCI) has awarded a $10,000 grant to a mortuary pro-
gram that enhances mortuary sciences for tomorrow’s fu-
neral service professionals.
This year’s SCI Advancing Mortuary Science Education
Grant has been awarded to the
American Academy McAl-
lister Institute of Funeral Service
(AAMI).
The Institute
plans on using the grant monies to enhance its curriculum
to incorporate a series of “role-playing scenarios” that will in-
volve all of the students in the class in performing basic func-
tions that are found in every funeral home. The long-term
goal will be to build scenarios in all funeral service courses
that will help the students understand the curriculum more
SCI Awards AAMI with $10,000 Grant
cited about getting to work on this project.”
The goal of the grant is to promote the development of
innovative funeral service programs that provide oppor-
tunities for students to develop their skills in delivering
exceptional customer care and service.
“Service Corporation International is proud to participate in
the ongoing educational process and program enhancements
which we anticipate will prepare students for the dynamic cus-
tomer driven changes confronting funeral service professionals
today. As leaders, we believe investing in education will have a
positive impact on the future of the funeral service profession,”
said
Steve Mack
, senior vice president of operations.
SCI received a number of grant applications with proposals
ranging from mock funeral chapel and arrangement confer-
ence rooms to the development of 3D technology to be used
interactively in the classroom. All applications were thor-
oughly reviewed by members of SCI’s leadership council.
SCI has more than 20,000 dedicated employees who pro-
vide the finest funeral, cremation and cemetery services to
hundreds of thousands of families each year. Operating from
a network of more than 1,800 funeral homes and cemeter-
ies, the people of SCI assist families with compassion and
guidance at difficult times, helping them celebrate the sig-
nificance of lives that have been lived and preserving memo-
ries that transcend generations with dignity and honor. For
more information,
functionally in theory and
application.
“This grant from SCI
provides an important new
opportunity for AAMI to
invest in instructional in-
novation that focuses spe-
cifically on the ‘hands-on’
and practical implementa-
tion of the theory that stu-
dents are learning in class,”
said
Meg Dun
, President
of AAMI. “We are very ex-