Giving Comfort to Families In Need
On Friday, March 27, nine WE Boston employees spent a half day preparing dinner and dessert for the families staying at the Devon Nicole House (DNH). The nonprofit organization is dedicated to providing safe, comfortable and affordable on-campus housing for families of children receiving care at Children’s Hospital Boston. When it opened its doors in June 2004, DNH became an important part of the comprehensive care system that Children’s began building in 1869.
Boston and the surrounding area have become synonymous with the high-quality healthcare, breakthrough medical research, and pharmaceutical and biotech innovations that have improved the lives of millions of patients and will continue to do so into the future. As the East Coast hub of the WE Healthcare Practice, the Boston office understands that this ecosystem can be as complicated as it is multilayered. What anchors the work that the practice does on behalf of our clients — and what drives the efforts of the men and women who are truly dedicating themselves to caring for others — is an understanding that we all do well when we focus on patients.
DNH exemplifies this focus by giving a measure of comfort to families when they need it. It can be easy to overlook certain aspects of the medical journey such as the need for food and housing, even with families throughout the globe seeking care in our city. At DNH two maps full of pushpins, showing the hometowns and cities of families from all over the U.S. and world, attest to the wide reach of Children’s and the need to ensure that families have a home base while their children receive care.
WE Boston stepped in to help where we could, by ensuring that the families staying at DNH would return that night to a fresh, wholesome dinner. We cooked trays of pasta, marinara sauce, sausage and meatballs. We steamed broccoli to a balance of crunchiness and tenderness reached by team consensus. We cut cheese, and laid out crackers and fruit. We made garlic bread and prepared salad, all under the careful watch and expert guidance of our office manager Soula Stratakias, head chef Jason Keller, and sous chef and general manager Chris Stamm. Other team members frosted and decorated vanilla, chocolate and red velvet cupcakes as encouragement for arriving children to create their own designs before enjoying their sweet treats.
The team cleaned up and left DNH feeling grateful for the opportunity to help others in a way that brought us all together and focused on providing comfort to the families staying there. Our WE volunteer time reminded us that there are a host of ways we can all help strengthen the compassionate, comprehensive healthcare community that Boston has become known for. More importantly, it gave us all the opportunity to practice what we preach every day on behalf of our clients.
