Left to right-Vicki Johnson/Director of Development, Joni Patri/Board of Directors, Tom Staebell/Interim Director, and Sara Brunner/Coordinator of Volunteer Services
Crossroads House is celebrating 25 years in the community this year with a new Interim Director
Crossroads House held their first Business After Hours/Schmoozer in the Garden event put on by the Genesee County Chamber of Commerce last week. Members of the Crossroads House Board of Directors and local supporters were on hand to thank the community for helping provide services at Batavia’s only comfort care home.
Local businesses donated goods and services for the first Business After Hours event at Crossroads House. Buttercrumbs Bakery, Batavia Tops Friendly Markets, Circle B Winery, Angotti Beverage and Mr. Wine & Liquor all helped make the first Schmoozer in the Garden a success. Community members who came out to support Crossroads House also donated “Wish List” items and made monetary donations.
Crossroads House, located at 11 Liberty Street, is celebrating 25 years this year and has a new Interim Director since this past March, with founder Kathy Panepento retiring as Director. Panepento is now Director of Resident Care and Doula Services.
“We’re really looking at how we can sustain, and move on for another 25 years, developing a roadmap,” says Tom Staebell, Interim Director.
Staebell has been a Resident Care Volunteer, End of Life Doula, and has run the Grief Support Group during his seven years at Crossroads House.
“Everyone in the House already knows me, they know my nature, they know who I am, so it really wasn’t a hard transition. Working at a nonprofit is very different than when I worked in the public school system.”
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(Provided BIO from Crossroads House)
Tom has been working in education for 33 years. His career began as a speech pathologist, and he then moved into educational administration. He retired as an elementary principal serving the districts of Pembroke, West Seneca and New York City. Deciding to volunteer at Crossroads House after caring for his wife, brother, and mother, Tom has been a Crossroads House volunteer for seven years. He provides resident care, end-of-life doula services, and facilitates our grief peer support group. He is presently taking a course to become a certified grief educator. After being retired for 13 years, Tom is excited to become the Interim Executive Director. He supports the vision of helping you live your best life until you take your last breath. He believes our volunteers are the backbone of CRH. Volunteers include resident care, fundraising, office, and gardening. Without them we would not be able to open our doors.
Recently a family member of a resident stated, “coming into the house feels like you are getting a big hug.” Tom believes that every resident and their family are immediately adopted into the Crossroads Family. When they are here, and after, this becomes their home. “We invite everyone to feel welcome here at the house. Stop by, have a cup of coffee, and get to know us. You’ll walk away feeling the love.”
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“My role right now is to get everything into place that will make it easy for a new executive director to step into. Anything that will make it easy for that new person to come in is what I’m working on. Making sure all the operational things are in place, the budgetary things are in place, we have dotted all our I’s crossed out T’s.
Right now, the Board of Directors has not started their active search for a director.
“We’re a comfort care home where we take care of the resident at the end-of-life and their families, but we are also looking at moving forward and being an educator for death and dying. The elephant in the room is always that we don’t want to talk about death and dying and I think that’s where we are going to be moving to is becoming in the community a place where we can educate people, cause if we can educate people about death and dying it takes away the fear about death and dying.”
Staebell say dying is a life event that will eventually happen to us all.
“Everybody talks about life events like when a baby is going to be born, everybody plans for that and knows what’s going to happen, but when it comes to death everybody just quiets down and doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s like if we don’t talk about it, it’s not going to happen, but it’s going to happen to all of us some day. Our goal here is to take away that fear through education.”
Crossroads House “A Gift to the Community, Made Possible by the Community.”
Interim Director Tom Staebell with Chamber of Commerce President Brian Cousins presenting a Certificate of Appreciation.