Bereavement Care Service Centre Staff

Karen Mundell is a bereavement counsellor with the Southern Highlands Bereavement Care Service. Trained in Psychology and with a Masters degree in Counselling Karen marries her academic training with her desire to meet each person in their individual journey through suffering to a place of hope for life in the future.

Karen works with individuals, families and groups. She also provides a "creative play space" in her work with children making the counselling environment a safe place to explore feelings that may not yet be available through verbal language to the child.

Karen has a special interest in working with traumatic experience and the relationship between despair, sadness and anxiety and depression. Informed by modern psychodynamic theory she is acutely aware of the impact of the counselling relationship to each client and so respectfully enters into this relationship with each individual who accesses counselling with her at the service.

Denise Hiser is the Administrative Assistant to the counsellors at the Southern Highlands Bereavement Care Service. Denise has been delighted to hold this position since 1997.

Denise attended the Metropolitan Business College at Parramatta and worked as a Legal Secretary in Sydney before marrying and living overseas. She moved to the Southern Highlands with her husband and children in 1988.

Denise is proud of the Service and appreciates the comfort and support it provides to the people of her community. Denise brings her experience and commitment as confidential secretary, and respects the rights of all clients to their complete privacy.

Denise's role in the Service is to provide support to the counsellors by handling the day to day administrative tasks, enabling them to use their time for the care of the bereaved.

She is much appreciated by all – management committee, counsellors, clients and everyone who encounters her - for her flawless efficiency, and unfailing good humour.

In February 2011, Erica Webber returned to Bowral, and to work once again with the Southern Highlands Bereavement Care Service. She previously worked with us from 1997 to 2002.

Working with bereaved people has been close to Erica's heart for many years, and with lots of different counselling experience during the intervening time, she is finding it especially rewarding to once again work for the SHBCS, and to have the privilege of "being with" people during this part of life's journey.

Erica likes to work with both individuals and families, in all the many circumstances where death has occurred, recognising the unique experience of grief for each person. She has a sensitivity to those who have experienced the death of a child, and also in situations where there has been a suicide.

She finds being with people (and their families) who are preparing for death, a particularly special time.

Erica loves to be involved with community education of all sorts, and seeks out opportunities to raise awareness around issues concerning grief and loss and death and dying. She also enjoys providing supervision and mentoring to other professionals who may be working in this field.