Category: Staff Stories

Over the winter and spring we’ve welcomed several new team members to Hospicare, and we’d like to give you a chance to get to know them:

Stephanie received her Bachelor’s degree from the ILR School at Cornell and her JD from Northeastern University School of Law. She is a licensed attorney in both Massachusetts and New York and loves being able to use her legal training and employment law background every day working in HR. She also loves working in HR because she enjoys helping people navigate work challenges and feel engaged and fulfilled in their jobs.

Stephanie is inspired working at Hospicare in particular because the staff lead with their hearts. She holds a deep respect for Hospicare’s mission and says that “working here every day, I am reminded of the truly important things in life.” Having grown up in Ithaca, she has been a part of the Hospicare community long before joining as staff. Her grandmother’s memorial was held in the Great Room in 2005, and she participated in Women Swimmin’ in 2010. Stephanie loves podcasts, coffee, yoga, hiking, camping, and her cat.

Christina has been a nurse for almost fourteen years. In that time, she has experienced many different types of nursing. She started at Hospicare in 2009 as a PN and worked until 2015. She then worked at Bridges Cornell Height as a DON, Administrator, CM, and janitor on the weekends. At Bridges, she trained her staff to think as hospicare aids and nurses. She returned to Hospicare because she loves this organization and is excited to be back.

Christina is a lifelong Tompkins County resident. She comes from a long line of Ithacans with a huge extended family. She lives with her husband of 27 years, four children, flock of chickens, and rescue dog. She loves gardening, cooking, working on puzzles, and crocheting.

Julie, RN-BSN, has been a Licensed Massage Therapist for fifteen years. While practicing massage and raising her kids, she became a birth doula and dabbled a great deal in home birth. She also went back to school and became a nurse. She worked in labor and delivery for a while, then in a primary care practice as a nurse manager and perinatal nurse. After transitioning into hospice care work, she “fell in love with a new kind of nursing, caring, and compassion during some of the most intimate and critical times of a person’s life.” She is thrilled to have found a new home working at Hospicare.

Julie is an original west-cost gal who came to upstate NY as a young girl and has migrated back and forth several times throughout her life. She is a wife, a mother of three adult kids, and an “Oma” to four beautiful grandchildren with one more on the way. Julie loves all four seasons and finds solace in horseback riding, quilting, nature, gardening, camping, hiking, and being near all bodies of water. She also loves to write and hopes to publish a book one day.

Over the winter and spring we’ve welcomed several new team members to Hospicare, and we’d like to give you a chance to get to know them:

Emily Hopkins is an army veteran and a graduate of West Virginia University and Johns Hopkins University. She has worked in fundraising and institutional advancement for many years. In her eight years at Cornell University, she was a writer in Principal Gifts, Major Gifts, and University Communications. She was the senior editor of Cornell’s Ezra magazine and later helped raise money and organize stewardship and events for Cornell’s Prison Education Program.

Before moving to Ithaca, Emily was a magazine editor at Scholastic (Instructor, Afterschool, Choices) and a fact checker at the New Yorker magazine, where a dozen or so of her cartoons were published between 2004 and 2008.  As a volunteer, she has served as vice president of the board for Cinemapolis and as president of the Tompkins County Public Library Foundation Board of Directors. She’s also done fundraising work for the First Unitarian Society of Ithaca, Ithaca Children’s Garden, the College Initiative at OAR, and the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes. She is author of the popular illustrated weekly newsletter Emily Writes Back, “an advice column for brilliant people.”  

Kimari has worked in higher education for over twenty years. In addition to teaching English classes, she has held a variety of administrative roles including writing center director, faculty advisor to the honor society, and writing editor for the TC3 literary magazine. Coordinating events like induction ceremonies and educational programming has always been one of the highlights of her work. Kimari enjoys volunteering for local causes, and she is a poet and avid traveler who loves meeting people.   

Brenna Fitzgerald is a writer, editor, and coach empowering people to discover and nourish their most authentic voice. She teaches yoga and meditation and hosts a podcast called Creative Recovery where she explores creativity as an agent of healing and social change in conversation with people of diverse backgrounds and identities. 

Brenna has lived and worked in many different countries and loves learning about other cultures. Some of her previous professional roles have included teaching English in Japan, serving as a social justice educator, and most recently working as a Communications and Outreach Coordinator for the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.

Brenna is driven to create impact in the world through her writing and through working directly with people in a healing capacity. Recently, Brenna had the honor of facilitating a workshop for the Hospicare community called “Recovering your Creative Spirit in Grief.” She is thrilled to be joining Hospicare as the Communications Coordinator and to be working with others also committed to helping people understand the importance of hospice, palliative care, and grief support.

“I have witnessed firsthand the power of Hospicare’s mind-body-spirit approach to supporting people at the end of their life and in grief. It is a true honor for me to join an organization such as Hospicare whose mission and commitment to serving others is in alignment with my own heart’s calling.”