My Journey to becoming an award winning celebrant – How a disappointing funeral for my Aunty led me to train as a celebrant myself

From FPC: We couldn’t be prouder of Vicky Griffiths being crowned ‘National Wedding Celebrant of the Year 2025’ at the recent TWIA awards. Since training with us as both a funeral and wedding celebrant back in 2021, she has worked phenomenally hard to grow her business and provides exceptional service to both couples and bereaved families, always going above and beyond in everything she does.

As we mentioned in another recent blog, since the ‘Celebrant of the year’ category was introduced to the TWIA awards seven years ago, celebrants who have completed their training with us at the Fellowship of Professional Celebrants have won the national title for five of those seven years. On the two years that our celebrants didn’t take the top accolade, the award was presented to Humanist Officiants – meaning no graduate from any other Independent Celebrant training provider has yet to win the national title. In addition to this, we are proud to have trained numerous regional winners and semi-finalists in this category over the past seven years too.

Here, National Wedding Celebrant of the Year 2025, Vicky Griffiths, shares the personal story of her journey to becoming an award winning celebrant.

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As I weaved my way around the cloisters and past the bays of floral tributes, absorbed within all of the black coats and shoes of those leaving the Crematorium, I felt sad but also so disappointed.  In that service, the words shared about the lady, well, they just weren’t right for my Aunty.

I couldn’t shake off the feeling that she had been let down.  For days after I thought about the funeral service and how it just didn’t represent the playful, cheeky, quite naughty character of our 90-year-old Aunty M.

There were so many parts of her life that weren’t shared – the funny anecdotes, her sayings and daft ways, her love of a Wednesday lunch time pinot and a fag.  The thousands of scarves she had, many of the same design, that lady loved M&S!

I wondered how it could have been any different?

Until that time, I had only heard of the work of a celebrant from a friend who said that a celebrant had officiated a service for her cousin.  My friends live in St Albans, a very different demographic of society from where I live in south Wales.  I didn’t even know we had celebrants in my area.

I had a cursory Google about what celebrants did – learning that as representatives of families, celebrants can support couples and families in celebrations of all life events.  My brain did a spilt second decision tree and put ‘funerals’ in the ‘mmmm maybe not’ bucket, but ‘weddings’ in the ‘oh, that could be fun’ pile…

I didn’t think a lot more about it, one of those bits of research like when you think about a trip you’d like to take.

At this point I was a senior change manager working at a university, using the skills I’d developed over a 25-year career in communications and marketing.  I’d also had run my own business consultancy for 12 years before I was persuaded to work in a large organisation again.

In a corporate environment again, it was the people that kept me going, but the assignments I worked on were not fulfilling.  I wasn’t doing enough to make a difference.

Driving home from work one evening, I started to think about what I was going to do next?  My flame was going out, the fire in my belly constantly extinguished by process and admin. I had capacity to do something alongside my day job…. I knew I needed to scratch this itch, and seriously got into some research about becoming a celebrant.

I booked a call with Terri Negus, the founder of the Fellowship of Professional Celebrants.  This was the spring of 2021 and after the pleasantries and sharing the background of FPC and the work of Celebrants, Terri wasted no time by telling me that she was running the first face-to-face course following Covid-19 social distancing – she was so excited to be ‘in person’ and hosting a course in Ascot within the next few weeks.

The only thing was – it was training for future funeral celebrants, and I did not think that was for me!  The next wedding and family celebrant training course was going to be later in the year.

After the conversation with Terri, I felt so motivated and invigorated – perhaps I could help families, and maybe help with funeral services, once a month, (ha! Naïve!) alongside my university job?  And then I might talk to couples about wedding ceremonies?

I was told about the foundations of the FPC – I liked the ethics, I loved the authenticity and the honesty about the role too – there was no sales of a daydream – Terri made sure I knew it was going to be all consuming hard work, that there was no guarantee of bookings, that it is a competitive marketplace.

And still….. it was a YES !

I booked onto to the funeral celebrancy training course  and went up to Ascot in the summer of 2021. Those three days were life changing.  I felt like I’d shed an old skin.  I drove home buoyant, rejuvenated and with a thousand more questions!

A couple of months later, I qualified from my marriage and family celebrancy training, spending time with a lovely group of people, this time on Zoom, with FPC course leader Michelle Taylor.

Since that year of training in 2021, I organised my own styled shoot to get some images for my website and social channels. I concentrated on growing the marriage side of the business first of all, as that has a much longer lead time.  I went to a few wedding fayres, establishing connections with gorgeous couples who were looking for a more personal ceremony on their wedding day.

Local venues started to take interest and I built up a healthy forward book for wedding ceremonies over the coming couple of years.

I also focussed on direct relationship building with funeral homes, and I did some unpaid work experience and volunteering with the local crematoria too, to understand their different practices, and know my place, I am a visitor in their facility, they call the shots!

By April 2022, I was gaining some traction, and after having the privilege to support families and making a difficult time the best it could be, people were starting to recommend me… which meant I needed to think about which lane of life’s motorway I was going to travel in.

I dropped some hours at the university, and then dropped a few more, eventually taking a leap of faith to run my own business once again.  I always had consultancy, great connections with businesses as well as freelance writing that I could do – and that’s a very important point to make – make sure you think through sources of income because bookings don’t arrive like a regular pay cheque, and there’s no sick pay, annual leave or pension. Do your research and work out your financial plan in line with family circumstances and life milestones.

After years of writing business plans and creating cash flows and P&L forecasts, I knew enough about my own competencies and how to cut the cloth.

There is plenty of work for everyone, and communities are more frequently wanting to work with celebrants, but work is not guaranteed and can be sporadic too.

I would also say my work is all consuming – and that works for my personality type – I function best when I am very busy.  When I’m quiet, I get myself into all sorts of trouble!

Vicky performing a wedding ceremony.