Threshold experiences in life, and 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.

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End-of-life Care

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

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

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Celebrations of Life

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

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

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Planning & Advocacy

Navigating health systems, making decisions, and establishing goals of care can feel overwhelming. We help you gain access to resources, complete vital paperwork, and move through meetings faster so you can focus on what really matters.

Our patient and family support specialists work with children, adults, families, and providers at home and in the hospital.

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About us

Beck Channer

Grief Counseling, Pediatric Patient Support, End-of-Life Care, Memorial Planning

  • aka Breq Lightner

    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.

    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 uses she/her and they/them pronouns 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?

Threshold Counseling, Sandwich Generation & Cancer Journey Support, End-of-Life Care

Kris Starr-Witort

  • Hi, I'm Kris...welcome, 

    I accompany people in moments when we find ourselves standing between what was and what will be, unsure how we will move forward. I believe that within these tender seasons of uncertainty, when we allow ourselves to be seen and held by others, we can tap into a deep well of healing and connection. As a group facilitator, counselor and end-of-life doula, I walk alongside you and create room for the raw discomfort and unexpected gifts of these in-between spaces.

    My calling for this work emerged early in my life, though I've only recently begun to listen more closely to its persistent invitation. Something awakened within me when I was sixteen and began volunteering at the AGAPE home, a hospice for men dying of AIDS. During quiet moments at bedsides, I witnessed deep suffering alongside unexpected grace, seeing the men in their wholeness and staying present when others turned away.

    This early understanding would be profoundly deepened decades later through my own experience with mortality. In 2023 at 45, I—a mother, nonprofit executive coach, and active community member—received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Already deep in the sandwich generation caring for aging parents while raising my own three children, I suddenly faced my own mortality and felt painfully alone and uncertain about what lay ahead.

    Having been both anchored and unmoored in my own journey, I understand that life can be exquisitely beautiful and terribly painful in the same moment, a complexity I honor in my work with you. I specialize in creating spaces where individuals, families, and groups feel seen and affirmed, especially caregivers stretched between caring for children and aging parents with little support for themselves.

    I bring both lived experience and professional training to this work (see *professional highlights). I'm deeply committed to making threshold services and end-of-life care accessible regardless of financial resources. I offer sliding scale services and am honored to serve communities too often overlooked in traditional healthcare settings.

    Whether accompanying you through a diagnosis, loss of a loved one, sandwich generation caregiving, or life's final moments, I honor your unique journey and am grateful to walk alongside you.

    Kris (she/her) finds herself living between the Bay Area with her husband and three kids and Portland where her parents live. 

    • Executive Coach, facilitator, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Consultant with extensive experience serving nonprofit and social justice leaders and organizations.

    • Co-designer/Facilitator - Emerging Leaders Fellowship - a year-long program for rising leaders of color in the nonprofit sector 

    • Senior nonprofit leadership roles in talent development, coaching, and organizational culture 

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

    Education:

    • Currently pursuing Interfaith Chaplaincy Certification at Graduate Theological Union

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

    • BA Communications, University of Minnesota

    • Professional Certified Coach, International Coaching Federation

    Other Relevant Experiences

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

    • Anchor Health Hospice Volunteer Training Program

    • Participant of Commonweal’s Cancer Help Program

    • Year to Live Program at Spirit Rock 

    What Kris Finds Compelling 

    • Sacred Transitions & Threshold Moments - those profound moments when everything shifts and we stand between what was and what will be. 

    • The Power of Witness & Presence -  how being truly seen can catalyze healing, and the transformative power of authentic accompaniment through difficulty.

    • Equity & Accessibility in End-of-Life Care - dismantling barriers and creating inclusive and nourishing spaces for all types of grief and dying.

    • Supporting Stretched Caregivers - supporting caregivers with the unique challenges of caring for multiple generations simultaneously with little support for themselves. 

At the heart of it

From Beck, co-founder of Threshold Movement

ThresholdMovement 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 precious opportunity is to be present with what is, and to ask for care and support when we need it.

Together is better. ❤️‍🩹

Beck offering care to a nurse while advocating for Pickle’s wishes. Learn more: Child & Family Wraparound Support

Testimonials

  • "I had the great fortune to meet Kris at the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. It was soul sisters at first sight, as Kris's compassion and vulnerability enveloped me with love and kindness. I believe Kris is called to do this work. She embodies the education and intellect of a licensed social worker with deep personal experience of grief and loss. Her support as I navigate the cancer world has been life-changing and I'm forever grateful."

    Myra

  • “Beck's knowledge and skills when it comes to emotional support and advocacy for our families is unparalleled. I remember one specific time when a teenage patient was in the final moments of his life and the family was very expressive in their grief. In a moment like this, many others would hesitate, but Beck walked into the room and guided the family to circle around their loved one, and then to match their breathing to the same pace of the patient’s ventilator, which instantly brought calm and presence. In one of the hardest moments in this family’s life, Beck was able to give them peace."

    Social Worker
    UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital

  • “Kris' patience, understanding, and light was very helpful in a dark time for my family. Kris was able to participate in some of the most integral parts of my mother’s transition, and my mother was so warmed by her presence. Kris was understanding, and understood boundaries. She is kind, and knowledgeable in the tender space a human needs to let go of the physical realm, and the sensitivity of those faced with letting go of this person."

    Byron

  • "I am so happy I found Beck as a grief counselor and friend. The loss of my husband from suicide has been tough and only certain people understand. Those I have met on this grief journey are some of the most beautiful souls. My husband was a beautiful soul. Knowing other people's stories, knowing Beck, these things literally sustain me. I have no family nearby, but in a way, I do. I have that."

    Kristin

  • “Beck's support of the organization was invaluable and deeply appreciated. The [all staff] gathering and the 1:1 sessions gave our employees tools and support they really needed. Per Beck's recommendation, we set up an altar and made sure to celebrate our colleague's birthday a few weeks after she passed. We also planned a special memorial event. We've found a variety of ways to honor her memory and our grief, while continuing to move forward."

    Director of People & Culture
    Save the Redwoods League

  • "Kris helped me see myself and what is possible - she has a unique ability to listen to what I am and am not saying and gently push me to explore why something may be. She helped me realize what I am capable of and how to own the next chapter of my life."

    Margaret

  • "Beck is great at quickly reading a room and meeting people where they're at. I have seen Beck achieve closeness with children who are withdrawn, patients who initially did not think they want to talk, and with family members who needed an ear as well. Beck has an aura that lifts yet calms and I smile every time we cross paths."

    Dr. April
    Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)

  • “Every single person who attended the grief release session had great things to say about how they felt during and afterwards. Beck is great at what they do and so appreciated by our entire team!”

    Marketing Manager
    Olivia Travel

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