BRATTLEBORO — Brattleboro Area Hospice received a $1,000 grant from the Crosby-Gannett Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation. The grant will help further Brattleboro Area Hospice's work to provide a broad range of volunteer-based services for living and dying well, focusing on end-of-life, bereavement, and advance care planning.
This support will further ensure that advance-care-planning support services can continue to be available free to the community.
“As an organization integrally involved with our community, we are particularly delighted to partner with this fund focused on the vitality and betterment of the Brattleboro area,” said Andrea Livermore, BAH's director of development and community outreach, said in a news release. “We believe our programs do just that.”
Taking Steps Brattleboro is a collaborative, community-based initiative intended to achieve a significant increase in the numbers of people in the Brattleboro area who have completed the Advance Care Planning process.
The program recruits, trains and matches volunteer facilitators with people interested in participating in advance care planning. The end product is a completed advance care plan filed with significant others, including health care providers and registered with the state.
More than the completion of a document, BAH says the process also initiates discussion of end-of-life wishes and the communication of those wishes to people in one's closest circles.