Greg Schneider, CEO, Executive Director and Founder of the HEAL Project http://www.healproject.org, has been directly involved with hospice as a volunteer caregiver at the bedside of the dying since 1996. His experience has given him the insight to see that compassionate care starts with first intimately knowing ourselves and then having a good understanding of the nature of the dying person’s journey. From there the uncertainties can be minimized, allowing us to give care in a more tender and loving manner.

The Hospice Educators Affirming Life (HEAL) Project was founded in 1999 to initiate a grassroots effort to educate the public about hospice and its benefits. The HEAL Project was incorporated in the State of California as a non-profit corporation in January 2004. In May 2004 the corporation received a 501(c)(3) federal income tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Service and a 23701d state income tax exemption from the State of California Franchise Tax Board.

The HEAL Project has a long term vision of making the care of the dying and support of their families the best it can be. This includes support of caregivers and family members before and after the loss of their loved one. The HEAL Project’s evolution since its inception has been primarily driven by the educational needs of those individuals who are acting as caregivers to the dying. While the primary mission focus was on public education, the scope has now broadened to include education for hospice volunteers. We believe that compassionate care begins with an intimate knowledge of the caregiving journey. Our educational focus falls into three general categories:

• Educating the public regarding caring for dying loved ones and the importance of hospice as part of that care
• Developing innovative hospice volunteer education programs that will permit hospices to improve quality and reduce training costs
• Integrating volunteers into pediatric hospice care, which is a rapidly emerging sector in the hospice community, requiring the cultivation of new volunteer skills.

Greg has served as a volunteer caregiver with numerous hospices in Northern California since 1996. He has served at the Zen Hospice Project and the George Mark Children’s House in the San Francisco Bay Area. He presently volunteers with Memorial Hospice, Hospice of Petaluma, Heartland Hospice and Sutter VNA in Sonoma County in Northern California. He serves at the bedside as vigiling volunteer and plays the harp for his patients and for various hospice-related events.

He is a volunteer group facilitator for the Hospice of Petaluma’s bereavement group for children who have lost a parent as well as for the Children’s Cancer Community support group, which supports families whose children have cancer. He also serves as volunteer group facilitator for adults grieving the loss of a child or spouse for Heartland Hospice.

In 2008 Greg established the Hospice Community Forum (HCF), which is a rapidly growing venue for the entire hospice community to network on critical issues relating to the important work that the community does as well as stimulating professional growth through better communication.

Greg was selected by Johns Hopkins University to be a member of the Interdisciplinary Palliative Care Delegation to China and Tibet in October 2006. The goal of this delegation comprising various hospice disciplines was to understand how medical care was practiced in China and Tibet, both traditional and western approaches, and to see how these countries had developed their palliative and end-of-life care services.

In 2005 Greg founded the Hospice Volunteer Association (HVA), which is now the world’s leading association for Hospice Volunteers and Volunteer Managers. HVA was created with the goal of Encouraging Excellence in Hospice Volunteering Through Education and Communication. Since its inception, HVA has introduced several new, innovative and unique services that benefit the hospice community such as the National Hospice Document Repository and the Patient Data Vault.

HVA is presently collaborating on several important projects relating to the use and training of hospice volunteers

• Volunteer Training/Mentoring Program for 3^rd World and Developing Countries - HVA is collaborating with the International Association of Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) to develop a program to expand access to hospice and palliative care by training volunteers to make basic patient assessments to assist physicians as well as training them on the basics of hospice volunteering.? This program will make use of technology to permit long distance mentoring.
• Play It Forward - this is a non-profit project that will supply music to hospice and palliative care providers and patients, in association with HVA and Compassionate Communications using iPods at no cost to the hospices.
• Telehospice Project - HVA is in the early stages of a collaboration with the University of North Texas to explore the use of new video technology to allow volunteers to connect with patients in remote/rural areas.

The HEAL Project plans to offer its first courses for the Hospice Volunteer Training Institute (HVTI), an online training program for hospice volunteers and managers, in the Fall of 2009 in conjunction with its pediatric volunteer program called Hannah’s Friends. It is the goal of the HEAL Project to make HVTI a vehicle for change that will allow our society to harvest and retain more compassionate caregivers from our communities. Through academic and experiential contributions from the hospice community at large, we are developing a broad curriculum of courses that will raise hospice volunteer education to new heights.

In January of 2003 Greg began authoring and publishing the HEAL Project online Information Letter Series as a public service to educate the general public about hospice and to promote more public dialogue on death and dying issues. This program is part of the HEAL Project’s Community Outreach Program in Education (COPE). The program has been well received by the public and by hospice organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

In early 2003 he began development of the HEAL Project’s Hannah’s Friends program, which provides experienced hospice volunteers to support families who have a child with a life-threatening illness. The program’s volunteers are available to support families in numerous ways: in their homes, hospitals and in residential hospice facilities. Their primary purpose is to support and guide families through this most difficult time when their child is dying and then to support them beyond their loss. The Hannah’s Friends is successfully serving families in Northern California.

Greg has been a guest on Grace Cathedral’s LightWorks TV program (KRON-TV Ch4 San Francisco) to discuss the role of the hospice volunteer and the importance of hospice to the community. He also was the featured guest on San Francisco’s KGO radio talk show to discuss hospice and the differences between curative and palliative care as well as answering questions from the show host and KGO listeners.

He also lectures and conducts workshops for local schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching students about grief, loss and other issues related to death and dying.

Greg has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) from the University of Santa Clara and a Bachelor’s degree in EE from San Jose State University. He previously founded and managed a successful technical consulting business that served high-tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years.

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