Thinking Ahead: New Hospicare director excited to lead

Earlier this month, Hospicare & Palliative Care Services in Ithaca announced the hiring of its eighth executive director, Joe Sammons, who is set to join the Hospicare team in February.

Sammons succeeds Kimberly De Rosa, who served as executive director until September 2020. As Tompkins Weekly covered previously, former County Administrator Joe Mareane served as interim executive director after De Rosa left the organization.

Sammons has extensive experience in health care and nonprofit work both within and outside Tompkins County. Prior to moving to Ithaca in 2008, he served as executive director of the Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center in Boston and as assistant vice president of operations for the Community Healthcare Network in New York City.

After moving to Tompkins County, Sammons soon became involved in many area organizations. He served as the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes, where he created and completed a capital campaign of over $8 million for Planned Parenthood, which led to the building of new health centers in Hornell, Corning and Ithaca.

Sammons explained what brought him to Planned Parenthood over a decade ago.

“I had always been interested in advocacy and empowerment, and Planned Parenthood had always stood out to me as an organization that was very powerful and really committed to empowering women — and men, frankly — to make decisions for themselves,” he said. “I knew they needed someone who understood health care, but also, they wanted someone to build new health facilities in our community. And that was pretty exciting to me.”

In 2015, Sammons joined Challenge Workforce Solutions, which provides training, vocational services and employment for people with disabilities and other barriers. Sammons currently serves as the executive director of Challenge.

Sammons said that Challenge’s mission of supporting those who are less advantaged appealed to him, and when he saw that the organization itself was struggling at the time, he saw an opportunity to help.

“The organization was near bankruptcy,” he said. “I knew I could be of service to help rebuild this organization and keep it going. And that’s what we’ve been able to do — putting together a great team, staying really focused on the most important, powerful part of your mission. And Challenge is now healthy financially.”

Outside of these leadership positions, Sammons is also involved with other county organizations, like the Tompkins County Human Services Coalition, the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, the Tompkins County Workforce Development Board and Ithaca Rotary.

When describing his community involvement, Sammons said his motivation was the same as it was for Planned Parenthood and Challenge — he saw an opportunity to help.

“These are smaller organizations, but they have a really important role in creating a single community,” he said. “And I know with my experience as the CEO or executive director of larger nonprofits that I can really help those organizations grapple with financial issues they may be having or leadership transitions.”

Sammons’ journey to Hospicare started when he first moved to the county, he said. Sammons became fast friends with a previous Hospicare executive director, so he was familiar with the organization’s work early on. The connection soon became even more personal.

Hospicare took care of Sammons’ father-in-law at the end of his life, and in the spring of 2020, Sammons’ father needed hospice services, which Hospicare provided.

“Unfortunately, one thing we found with my father is, it wasn’t until Hospicare got involved that pain was seen as something more than a side effect,” Sammons said. “The patient really is the center of this palliative care [in] this hospice model. And I felt very passionate about being able to be connected to it.”

Sammons said that when the opportunity came up late last year to join Hospicare, he jumped at the chance, seeing it as a possible next journey in his life and a way to understand how to make services like what Hospicare provides “the model, not the exception.”

Betsy East, president of the Hospicare Board of Directors, said that while the search for a new executive director yielded many promising applicants, Sammons still stuck out among the crowd.

“Instead of being easy choices, we had lots of good candidates, several finalists, and it was great to meet them all,” she said. “Joe turned out to be, in so many ways, the perfect fit for us. He has substantial leadership experience in health care organizations and in moving the organizations forward in every case. He’s a strategic thinker and a great listener. And he’s a visionary with a big heart. He ‘likes doing good work for good people,’ as he says.”

When describing his leadership style, Sammons referenced the importance of listening.

“A leader has to, not necessarily find consensus, but form it by a lot of communication, a lot of listening and finding what we all have in common,” he said. “What we have in common is much more important than what we have that’s different. And, in an organization, as a leader, it’s really important for me to find what everybody has in common across the entire organization and to get all of the systems and to get the organization moving towards that thread.”

Now that his efforts to join Hospicare have paid off, Sammons has his sights set on the future. Beyond the initial stages of getting to know the organization and its staff, Sammons said he’s hoping to use his experience to help Hospicare collaborate with other local organizations and to grow as a result.

“Partnerships are really extraordinarily important currency in health care,” he said. “We have a lot of opportunity to work with organizations in Cortland County and all throughout Tompkins, whether they’re health care or human services, and bring incredible resources of our communities together towards this mission.”

East said she and others at Hospicare are excited for what this leadership change means for the nonprofit, particularly for the staff members who have worked diligently through the pandemic.

“Our staff has done an incredible job over the last several months, but [also] all through the pandemic, so that our services have not been limited at all except that we’ve been doing our events virtually,” she said. “Having a new executive director will be great because it’ll provide some continuity for what we’re doing. … It will be really nice to have somebody settle in and be the executive director for the long term.”

Sara Worden, assistant director of community engagement at Hospicare, shared that sentiment.

“We’ve gone through several leadership transitions in the past couple of years,” she said. “As a team, we’re really excited to have someone come on board that has a lot to offer and is connected in the community so that we can really start to move forward and together and as a team, as a group at Hospicare. We are starting to work with Joe to refine our strategic plan and to continue to grow and expand our mission.”

Worden added that the community also voiced support for the change.

“There was some really nice momentum on our Facebook post in which we announced Joe, just some really nice supportive comments from people in the community that know Joe personally and also were connected to hospice care,” she said. “They’re excited that that connection is being made. And … we’ve gotten some direct responses from our newsletter campaigns in support of our new hire.”

Outside the leadership change, Worden and East said Hospicare will be focusing its efforts in the coming months on expanding its palliative care programming and increasing outreach to underserved communities in Tompkins and Cortland counties. For more information about Hospicare and its services, visit hospicare.org.

In Brief:

Age Friendly Center for Excellence announces workshop series

The Tompkins County Age Friendly Center for Excellence will be holding a four-part virtual workshop series, “Age Friendly and Tompkins County: A Unifying Framework for Post-COVID Recovery,” with workshops held once a month from February through May 2021.

The first workshop, “What is Age Friendly Anyway? How it Benefits Agencies, Residents, Visitors, and Businesses” will be held on Feb. 17 from 10:30 a.m. to noon. To register, please visit https://www2.tompkinscountyny.gov/cofa/cfe-training-series.