Threshold experiences in life, and at death, are not meant to be endured alone

Together is better

Welcome to Threshold Movement—an experienced group of caregivers who help individuals, families, and organizations navigate illness, loss, and grief with compassion and love

Offerings

Threshold Counseling

When you or someone you love is diagnosed with serious illness or dies from natural causes, trauma, or suicide, the loss transforms your life forever. We help you greet these thresholds by honoring your unique experience and drawing on inner wisdom.

Our threshold and grief counselors offer care to any adult enduring illness or anticipating loss, including the loss of a child.

End-of-life Care

We believe every human being deserves a high-quality life and dignified death regardless of age, background, beliefs, or resources. With experience caring for both children and adults at end of life, we strive to ensure presence, peace, and profound connection.

Our end-of-life doulas also welcome those utilizing Medical Aid In Dying [MAID] and/or psychedelic-assisted support.

Celebrations of Life

Storytelling is at the heart of every memorial service we’ve helped plan and facilitate. We hold space for you and others to honor your loved one’s life in a way that feels personal, authentic, memorable, and deeply meaningful.

Our humanist celebrants specialize in joyful, non-religious, spiritual gatherings for cross-cultural communities.

Planning & Advocacy

Navigating health systems, making decisions, and designing personalized care plans can feel overwhelming. We help you gain access to resources, complete vital paperwork, and move through meetings faster to ensure a higher quality of life.

Our patient and family support specialist works with kids, adults, and families both at home and in medical facilities.

About us

  • My story has always been rooted in sonder: the realization that everyone around me is living a life as vivid, complex, and unique as my own. Our individual lived experiences can separate us, but they can also bring us together through calm presence, compassion, kinship, and love. From this posture, I am deeply committed to holding space for all humans to be their truest selves, to show up fully in relationship with one another, and to experience meaning, value, and belonging.

    As a young adult, my unconscious method for sorting significant childhood trauma was to fix the problems I believed were in my control. My career in social services and nonprofit management took off rapidly. I became a program manager and mentor for ‘high-risk’ youth in my early 20s. I joined the Peace Corps and focused on connecting rural, impoverished youth in Namibia with basic welfare services, and then I became the CEO of an economic development organization serving families in Tanzania. I was a certified foster care parent. I worked as a head coach for Seth Godin’s altMBA international education program. I founded two national social ventures, one that battled workforce pay inequities and another to help teenagers embrace their intersectional identities and stop code-switching. In an effort to walk my own talk, I came out publicly as queer at age 29.

    And yet, the most difficult and most meaningful work of my life began to unfold by surprise when I turned 30. My mom, who was also my best friend and co-pilot in life, a fiercely brilliant activist and unconditional lover of life and people, was diagnosed with cognitive impairment at age 56, and then dementia, and then young onset Alzheimer’s. While my personal and professional thresholds were expanding, hers began shrinking. I took care of my mom for eight years and eventually became certified with Providence ElderPlace to be her full-time caregiver, a role I held with good humor, angst, love, and pain. I was 38 when my beloved parent died in my arms at home. Her movement through this threshold wasn’t easy or peaceful, but we were together, always.

    I’m not convinced that ‘getting past’ immeasurable loss is a reasonable goal, but I do believe we can learn to walk alongside our grief. We can allow ourselves to be changed by these extraordinary experiences. For me, this looked like shifting my career focus to pediatric and adult end-of-life care. I began studying with Upaya Zen Center, and I volunteered with Anchor Health and George Mark Children’s House. I then graduated from a residency program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, during which I served as a full-time spiritual care provider in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) for one year. I regularly collaborated with palliative care doctors, nurses, social workers, and music and pet therapists to offer counseling, advocacy, and compassion for hundreds of adults, children, and their families. 

    Throughout my life, one common thread has always proven true: my capacity to connect in meaningful ways with others, especially those who bring intersectional identities and different cultural perspectives to the table, equals my capacity to catalyze change internally and externally. My understanding of love, equity, inclusion, and belonging developed from complex, textured, lived experiences. These stories created the canvas for a personally crafted mythology that centers mystical awe, interconnection, intraconnection, and love. We belong to each other because we are each other. Together is better.

    Beck lives on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay Area. Beck loves all pronouns with a special affinity for they/them in honor of their expansive and multitudinous internal universe.

    • 25+ years convening diverse stakeholders to design and coordinate social service programs that advance racial, economic, and psychosocial justice in North America and Africa.

    • 10+ years combined as a pediatric and adult hospice caregiver, grief counselor, humanist celebrant, and patient advocate specializing in complex illnesses and dementia.

    Relevant Education:

    • Anchor Health Hospice Volunteer Training Program

    • UCSF Clinical Pastoral Education Program, Level I & Level II

    • Upaya Zen Center G.R.A.C.E./Being With Dying Clinician Training

    • Seth Godin’s altMBA International Leadership Program

    • Providence ElderPlace Home Caregiver Training and Certification

    • Undergraduate study in English, Black American history, and theatre arts at Rutgers University and Grinnell College

    Accolades & Achievements

    • Ida M. Cannon Award for Competence, presented annually by the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Pediatric Social Work Department

    • Heart of Service Award, presented annually by the UCSF Department of Spiritual Care

    • PICU Employee of the Month, presented by the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital

    • Featured Speaker, Belonging at Work Global Summit

    Areas of Focus:

    • Complex grief counseling for individuals, families, and organizations

    • End-of-life planning and caregiving for kids and adults who are dying at home or in a hospital

    • Memorial and ‘celebration of life’ facilitation

    • Patient advocacy and goals of care planning for kids and adults with complex illnesses

    • Curious accompaniment: how can I support you in having the time of your life before you die?

Beck Channer

  • My deepest belief is that within our most tender and uncertain moments, when we allow others to see and hold us, we can tap a deep spring of healing and transformation. I am called to the work of accompanying people at threshold moments, when everything shifts and we find ourselves standing between what was and what will be. With compassionate and attentive presence, I create a safe space for the raw discomfort and unexpected gifts of these in-between spaces.

    This calling, to accompany others, emerged early in my life, though I've only recently begun to listen more closely to its persistent invitation. Growing up in a Midwestern Catholic household where service to others was a love language, something profound awakened in me when I was sixteen and began volunteering at the AGAPE home, a sanctuary for men dying of AIDS.  During quiet moments at the bedsides of dying men, I learned what it meant to be truly compassionate and present. I witnessed both deep suffering and unexpected grace, and saw the men in their wholeness, staying present when other people turned away.

    Decades later, after a successful career as a nonprofit leader and coach, life deepened my understanding of this calling. In 2023 at 45, I—a mother of three, executive coach, and active community member—received a cancer diagnosis, experiencing firsthand the loneliness and vulnerability I had witnessed in others. During a particularly difficult hospital stay, a chaplain sat with me, offering nothing but patient presence and helping me feel truly seen in my suffering. This experience confirmed what I knew but hadn't yet articulated: that healing happens not when we avoid our suffering, but when we allow ourselves to be held within it as we move through. 

    This understanding now shapes my work as a counselor for people at challenging threshold moments and as an end-of-life doula. I am guided by an unshakable belief that there is no single right way to live, grieve, or die. I believe that our lives unfold along countless worthy paths shaped by our experiences, identities, choices, and environments. Having been both anchored and unmoored in my own cancer journey, I understand that life can be exquisitely beautiful and terribly painful in the very same moment, a complexity I honor in every aspect of my practice.

    I bring both lived experience and professional training to this work. I've always been drawn to individual work that creates positive ripple effects and helps people know they are held at life's most challenging thresholds. Currently, I am pursuing interfaith chaplaincy at the Graduate Theological Union and hold a Master of Social Work from UC Berkeley. I also bring extensive experience as an executive coach for nonprofit and educational leaders, along with more than two decades working to advance greater equity and inclusion across the nonprofit sector.

    Whether accompanying you through a new diagnosis or the loss of a loved one, facilitating intimate family conversations, or bearing witness to life's final moments, I honor each person's unique journey and am grateful to walk alongside you.

    Kris and her family reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kris uses she/her pronouns.

    • Executive Coach and DEI Consultant with extensive experience serving nonprofit leaders and organizations including co-leading Silicon Valley Next, a fellowship program for rising leaders of color in the nonprofit sector 

    • Senior leadership roles in talent development and organizational culture at Beyond 12, Teach For America, and Education Pioneers

    • HIV/AIDS advocacy and support spanning over two decades, beginning as a hospice volunteer at 16

    • Currently pursuing Interfaith Chaplaincy certification at Graduate Theological Union

    Education:

    • MSW, University of California, Berkeley (Dean's Award recipient)

    • BA Communications, University of Minnesota

    • Professional Certified Coach, International Coaching Federation

    • Certified Professional Coach; Energy Leadership Index - Master Practitioner (ELI-MP) 

    Areas of Focus:

    • End-of-Life Companionship & Advance Care Planning

    • Grief Support & Bereavement Counseling

    • Life Transitions & Personal Transformation

    • Creating Affirming Spaces for Authentic Connection

Kris Starr-Witort

At the heart of it

From Beck, co-founder of Threshold Movement

Threshold Movement was birthed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at a renowned children’s hospital in San Francisco. It was here that I met a sassy, brilliant, and brave kid nicknamed “Pickle” who changed my life forever.

As the PICU Spiritual Care Specialist (also known as a hospital chaplain), I had the opportunity to befriend Pickle’s family, a motley crew of super humans with hearts of gold. Pickle was wrestling with an unexpected and very complicated illness that he would not survive.

During the last few months of Pickle’s life, I walked alongside his family during endless interactions with doctors, nurses, social workers, child life specialists, and other providers. Together we focused on offering the best medical care and the highest quality of life for Pickle. We cried, we laughed, we told stories, we played games, and we ate a lot of snacks. We focused on the present and in doing so made unforgettable memories for the future.

I don’t believe in the concept of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ death. Every body dies; no one is immune. Sometimes there is ease during the process, and other times struggle, same as when we’re born. Some lives last for minutes and others for decades. Every life is whole and complete, regardless.

I do believe in meaningful threshold experiences. There is no ‘right’ way to being alive, or enduring illness, or dying. Our only job is to be present with what is, and to ask for care and support when we need it.

Together is better.

Beck offering care and support to a PICU nurse outside of Pickle’s hospital room.

Say hello

Initial consultation calls are always offered free of charge.