Over 300 People Volunteer to Help Us Fulfill Our Mission. We Spoke to Four of Them.
It’s National Volunteer Week—a perfect time to celebrate our dedicated volunteers!
Volunteers help teams in all parts of our organization, including Hospice Care, Gender Affirmation, Finance, Business Development, and Home Care. They visit Hospice patients at home, provide comfort and companionship to Home Care patients, assist with administrative functions, even help write educational materials.
In 2023, a total of 323 individuals from Home Care and Hospice volunteered 20,243 hours of their time to VNS Health. In dollars, this comes out to about $650,000 in estimated savings to the organization. More importantly, what volunteers provide to our patients, members, and clients – as well as to our organization – is invaluable.
No doubt about it, volunteers play a vital role at VNS Health. We recently interviewed four of them to learn more about their experiences as VNS Health volunteers. Here are their stories.
“I feel I’m doing something important, and it makes me feel good.”
—Tacko Gumaneh, Intern Volunteer, Business Development Operations
Tacko Gumaneh is a recent graduate of Lehman College, where she received her Health Service Administration degree. During her final semester, she served as an intern with VNS Health’s Business Department, where her duties included helping with Visiting MD requests, calling vendors, verifying physician licenses, and sending referral requests.
Tacko’s internship was fully remote, which was ideal since she’d recently given birth to her daughter. Juggling a newborn baby with school and an internship wasn’t always easy, but Leslie Wong, Operations Coordinator, Business Development, and Asad Esa, Supervisor, Business Development who served as her supervisors and mentors, supported Tacko every step of the way.
“It was amazing working with the Business Development Operations team,” says Tacko. “They were very patient with me. I would ask a lot of questions and they would always respond, never making me feel like I was a bother. They gave me such a great experience.”
“It’s so rewarding when the people you’re working with express gratitude and show signs of more ease or happiness.”
—Nathanael Greene, Hospice Volunteer
Brooklyn resident Nathanael Greene started volunteering with VNS Heath in the fall of 2023. After completing the training to be a hospice volunteer, he began making home visits to hospice patients. In his current assignment, Nathanael and his patient go out for regular walks, often visiting a local coffee shop for afternoon tea and great conversation.
Nathanael, who works full time as Director of Renewable Energy Advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, finds volunteering incredibly rewarding. “My current patient is very explicitly grateful, saying ‘thank you’ all the time, which is nice to hear,” he notes. “But ultimately, what I am getting out of it is something more profound.”
For Nathanael, a practicing Buddhist, volunteering with hospice patients is a deeply personal experience, and something he looks forward to spending more time doing. Many of his teachers talked about hospice volunteering as a good opportunity for recognizing and coming to terms with the inevitability of death. “I lost both my parents a few years ago,” he says. “I saw then how being around people who are in that last state of life can be profoundly challenging and really rewarding at the same time.”
“This experience made me want to go to school for health care administration and get my masters.”
—Shahayra Hinojosa, GAP Program Intern Volunteer
Shahayra Hinojosa was completing her bachelor’s degree in public health at Monroe College when she interned with the Gender Affirmation Program (GAP) at VNS Health. During her five-month internship, she worked closely with mentor Asha Lyons, a GAP social worker, to create the GAP newsletter.
“Asha would always say, ‘be you and you’ll be fine,’ and I really took those words to heart,” says Shahayra. “Knowing her story made me want to keep going.”
Although the internship was virtual, Shahayra reports it was a very engaging experience. She credits Asha with teaching her new skills, especially around communication, time management, research, writing, and even graphic design.
“Before this experience, I knew I wanted to specialize in something, but I wasn’t sure what that was,” she adds. “I would talk about that with Asha, and she encouraged me to keep going. Thanks to Asha, I’m now in school studying to get my master’s degree in health care administration!”
“The call from my heart was to cultivate more compassion.”
—Robert Allen Warren, Hospice Volunteer
Bronx resident Robert Allen Warren began volunteering with the VNS Health Hospice program in January of 2023. An interfaith minister by training, he felt a calling to volunteer with hospice patients as a way to cultivate the compassion he feels for others. Currently, Robert makes regular visits to three hospice patients—two who are living in a nursing facility and one who lives at home. He enjoys sitting with them, listening to music, and hearing stories about their past.
One patient, who is living with Alzheimer’s, has had a significant decline in her ability to communicate in the time Robert has been visiting her. Although she could no longer speak, Robert began playing records that he found on her shelf, and they connected through their exploration of music.
“She had no memory left and no ability to speak, but her personality and kindness are still there,” says Robert.
For another patient who is non-responsive, Robert brings a loving, attentive, and calming presence to their visits. He appreciates the diversity of experiences among the patients he sees, noting that he spent a significant amount of time with hospice patients who served in the military.
“I feel like the time I spend volunteering is expanding my understanding of people’s life experiences,” Robert says. “I didn’t live their lives, but now I have all these other people’s lives in my heart.”