My name is April Stringer. I am a nursing student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and I am participating in the honors program. As part of the honors program, I have done some research and will participate in a service learning project in my community based upon that research. I also have to create and maintain a blog with weekly updates. I hope that you will follow me and feel free to interject your opinions, comments or ideas.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

The Twilight Brigade and much more..


Well, this week has been an interesting one to say the least. I continued trying to get my project going with New Beacon Hospice but was unsuccessful in my attempts. Once I realized that they were probably not the right partner for me, I began to look into other possible opportunities. During this time, I came across a wonderful website for an organization called The Twilight Brigade. I will tell you a little about The Twilight Brigade although my journey did not end there.

The Twilight Brigade was founded in 1997 to help raise consciousness about the needs of the dying, especially Veterans. They accomplish this through providing education to the community, and advocating for patients to ensure that no person has to die alone. They have chapters all across the United States, including Birmingham. Turns out, this was right up the alley of what I was hoping to achieve in working with a local hospice facility so I contacted the Birmingham area volunteer representative. The Twilight Brigade did not have anything specifically here in the Birmingham area right now because there are some changes being made due to the recent death of the founder of the Birmingham chapter. I was a little disappointed at that until she said that she had another person that she would put in touch with me that would probably be a perfect fit.

This leads me into the next step in my quite productive week. Not even a day later, I receive a phone call from Libby Jones, Volunteer Coordinator, with Comfort Care Hospice of Pelham. Since this communication had been made so quickly, I decided to go interview with Libby after I got off work Friday morning. Libby and I hit things off great, so a perfect fit might be a slight understatement. Her ideas lined up with the ideas I had for my project. We tossed around several ideas and I am in the process of researching these ideas to see what direction I want my project to take.
I hope that you will stay tuned next week to see what direction my project has taken!

No comments:

Post a Comment