A Qualitative Analysis of Grief Resilient Affirming Care through Empowerment (G.R.A.C.E.) for Psychiatric Social Workers Serving Black Students

Background and Purpose
Black students in K–12 settings experience grief in complex and multifaceted ways that extend beyond the loss of loved ones. These experiences often include racial trauma, exposure to community violence, systemic oppression, and other forms of chronic and disenfranchised loss. Despite the prevalence of these experiences, school-based mental health frameworks frequently rely on traditional grief models that do not fully capture culturally embedded grief processes affecting Black youth. This gap can lead to misinterpretation, minimization, or pathologizing of students’ responses to loss and adversity. To address this need, the GRACE (Grief Resilient Affirming Care through Empowerment) training was developed to enhance culturally responsive grief support for Black students. The purpose of this study was to examine how participation in GRACE training influenced Psychiatric Social Workers’ (PSWs) conceptualization of grief among Black students and their perceived ability to respond clinically within school settings pre and post GRACE training.

Methods
This qualitative study included fifty-four (n = 54) Psychiatric Social Workers from the Los Angeles Unified School District. Participants completed open-ended surveys administered before and after participation in the GRACE training. The surveys assessed clinicians’ understanding of grief among Black students, culturally responsive practices, and perceived clinical application. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify patterns in how PSWs’ perspectives shifted following the training. The analytic process involved iterative coding, theme development, and reflexive engagement with the data to capture changes in knowledge, cultural responsiveness, and clinical confidence.

Results
Four major themes emerged from the analysis. First, Expanded Understanding of Grief reflected participants’ increased recognition that Black students experience multiple forms of loss, including racialized trauma, community violence, and systemic inequities. Second, Culturally Grounded and Anti-Oppressive Practice captured PSWs’ growing appreciation for the importance of cultural humility, historical awareness, and contextualized meaning-making when supporting grieving Black students. Third, Shifting from a Deficit Lens to an Honoring-Based Approach illustrated how participants moved away from pathologizing interpretations of students’ behaviors and instead began to acknowledge grief responses as adaptive reactions to complex social realities. Finally, Enhanced Clinical Confidence and Utility highlighted that the GRACE framework provided practical language, strategies, and interventions that clinicians felt could be readily integrated into their school-based practice.

Conclusion and Implications
Findings suggest that the GRACE training framework meaningfully broadened PSWs’ conceptualization of grief and strengthened their capacity to provide culturally responsive and affirming support for Black students. The training supported clinicians in recognizing the intersection of grief, racial trauma, and systemic inequities within students’ lived experiences. The results underscore the importance of culturally grounded grief training within school-based mental health services. Professional development initiatives like GRACE can help PSWs move beyond traditional grief models toward approaches that honor the sociocultural realities of Black students. Integrating culturally attuned grief frameworks into practice may enhance clinicians’ responsiveness, promote healing-centered engagement, and improve the quality of school-based mental health support. Future research should examine the impact of such trainings on student-level outcomes and explore how culturally responsive grief interventions can be sustained and scaled within educational systems.