KORU Team
Ngaio Davis, founder and principal owner of KORU is a deathcare practitioner at heart, inspired by her rich Maori heritage and her maternal grandma and great grandma’s end of life rituals and experiences.
Ngaio’s life has never been conventional, from being raised on a small farm in rural BC, to becoming a red seal carpenter and working in construction to choosing to work in death care services. After a number of years working for conventional corporate funeral businesses she was eventually called to create her own practice where she relishes the freedom to spearhead meaningful and courageous conversations through her unconventional micro deathcare practice of KORU.
Rebecca Peckham joins KORU as a deathcare guide and fully licensed funeral director and decedent care specialist. She is honoured to serve families in her community and the wider community of Metro Vancouver, nurturing creativity and connection through an holistic deathcare approach.
Outside of her work in mortuary care, Rebecca is a multimedia artist with a passion for creating art from collage and found objects.
Photos of Ngaio and Rebecca by Jessica Jacobson of Woodsmoke Studio
Ngaio and the KORU staff are committed to providing genuine, thoughtful, eco-friendly deathcare services to their community of practice.
To achieve this, they are working towards understanding what it means to be carbon-neutral and acting on their learnings. We recognize and acknowledge that we have much work to do to achieve this goal, particularly in an industry that is notorious for being part of the problem and not part of the solution when it comes to environmentally sustainable practices.
Their current efforts include:
- Recognizing the importance of addressing KORU’s environmental impact and contributing to clean energy through Bullfrog Power. Our contributions are designed to help off-set flame cremation emissions, vehicle usage and general office useage.
- Acquiring and retiring a combined 2 tonnes of CO2e – that goes towards offsetting general emissions from operating practices from the Composting Facility in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
- Curating KORU’s merchandise to local, Canadian crafted, and/or made from sustainable materials.
- Choosing not to offer embalming services on-site, instead practicing only natural body care for the deceased.
- Planting trees every month with Tree Canada.
- Being a leader, innovator and educator in what we see as a new age of dying, death and end of life care by actively providing education about green deathcare practices.
- Teaming up with a terramation facility (natural organic reduction of human remains), Return Home in Auburn, WA to offer this eco-sensitive disposition option to folks in the Vancouver area.
- Supporting advocacy for Aquamation and Natural Organic Reduction, hoping to see these alternative and eco-sensitive disposition options become widely available in BC and beyond.
- Being an accredited member of the Green Burial Council, an organization that actively evaluates deathcare business to ensure compliance with green burial practices and provides education for everyone about the benefits of green deathcare. This accreditation assures families that KORU supports families with green burial, natural body-care practices, home death, home vigils and the “greening up” of our current cremation options, along with conventional funeral service offerings.
“Whether at home or in the workplace, it’s nearly always going to be easier and more cost-effective to reduce your resource consumption before seeking out greener alternatives.” – quote from Andrew Yang (BFP) blog on “Reduce, Replace, Balance” March 2022
