salt trails collective
grief
&
community
About us
Salt Trails Collective is a Leeway Foundation Award-winning interdisciplinary group of healers, artists, ministers, and activists who are united by a shared commitment to honoring grief as a vital and sacred part of the human experience. Founded in 2021 in Philadelphia, Salt Trails has offered community-based grief rituals that blend art, ancestral practice, and collective care. Through gatherings, storytelling, ritual, and creative expression, the collective invites people to move through sorrow in community—offering spaces where grief is not pathologized or hidden, but witnessed and held with reverence.
Rooted in a belief that grief work is community work, Salt Trails exists to help dismantle the isolation that so often accompanies loss. By creating accessible, welcoming spaces for people to be with their grief, Salt Trails helps reweave the social fabric that loss can fray. Their events reflect a commitment to cultural humility, ancestral wisdom, and creative process—making space for both personal and collective mourning in ways that nourish resilience, connection, and healing.
ritual, grief-honoring, sacred, creative, witnessing, ancestral, transformative, restorative, community
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![Smiling woman with glasses, earrings, and layered necklaces in a bright indoor setting.]()
Meghan Dwyer
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![A woman smiling outdoors near a tree, wearing a colorful patterned poncho, a pink head wrap, and large earrings.]()
Naila Francis
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![Woman with black hair, light skin, and a floral tattoo on her left arm, sitting outside in a garden, holding leafy greens and smiling.]()
Amy Mermaid Isakov
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Reverend Rhetta Morgan
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![A woman with glasses taking a selfie inside a church with stained glass windows in the background.]()
Priscilla Tennant
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![A woman with bright neon green hair, wearing multiple layered silver necklaces, a nose ring, and a green top with tiger print, smiling at the camera.]()
Elle Zaspel
Our offerings
Singing Our Grief
A communal ritual that invites participants to express sorrow, love, and remembrance through shared song and sound. Rooted in the belief that our voices can carry and transform grief, this practice creates space for collective healing, connection, and emotional release. Held monthly at Chestnut Hill United in the colder months and periodically out in the greater world.
Carrying Our Grief Together | Grief Processional
An annual community processional that honors the shared weight of sorrow through movement, music, and ritual. Rooted in collective care, this gathering invites participants to walk together in remembrance, solidarity, and the sacred act of grieving in public. Supported by collaborators The Threshold Choir and The Thread.
Five Gates of Grief
An interactive grief and art experience held in 2024 and inspired by Francis Weller’s framework, which named the many sources of sorrow we carry—both personal and collective. Through reflection, creativity, and communal witnessing, participants were invited to honor grief as a pathway to connection, meaning, and healing. This event was held in collaboration with The Threshold Collective.
Community Rituals
Community rituals are thoughtfully crafted experiences shaped by the specific needs of the space, time, and moment they inhabit. Whether marking loss, transition, or collective emotion, each ritual invites presence, connection, and meaning-making rooted in the uniqueness of its context. Dream with us, host us, build a more expansive world.
no one grieves alone
no one grieves alone
ritual
&
connection
Grief has always been communal, always been shared and consequently has traditionally been regarded as a sacred process. Too often in modern times our grief becomes private, carrying an invisible mantle of shame forcing our sorrow underground, hidden from the eyes that would offer healing. We must restore the conversation we need to have concerning the place of grief in our lives.
— Francis Weller
Still have questions?
Want to work together?
Reach out!
song
&
movement