June 2, 2023
From the moment Nora started as a graduate student intern with Kendal at Longwood and Crosslands in 1977, to her current role as Senior Vice President of Governance and Strategy with The Kendal Corporation, Nora has shown a commitment to Kendal and to serving her community.
Her Inspiration
A lifetime of service often means inspiration at a young age, as Nora’s story reveals. She credits her family, as well as experience as a Girl Scout and Brownie, that instilled in her a love of community service. Her parents were role models through service with the PTA and sports teams, saying “this is the way it works.”
Early exposure to community service helped form her belief that people should be “good community citizens” as a way to help themselves and those around them. Nora put this into action as she became an “active volunteer at church.”
Even as her career progressed, Nora continued to seek inspiration for community service, and found it at a Leading Age Conference. The CEO interviewed a group of young people, ranging in age from seven (7) into their 20s. Each had personal stories to share, from recruiting volunteers after a bone marrow transplant to fundraising for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. These stories, unique in their subjects, all had one overarching message that stuck out to Nora: “We do it because we can.”
Recent Work
Nora looks forward to her church reopening its food cupboard that served 180 people per week before the COVID-19 pandemic. She and other volunteers would set up tables with fresh and packaged food so that the patrons could pick out what they wanted and needed more easily with the help of volunteers. In the past, Nora and other volunteers prepared and served meals at the Life Center in Upper Darby (suburb of Philadelphia) for persons experiencing homelessness and food insecurity.
Promising Innovations
In addition to her external community service, Nora has also been an ardent supporter of Kendal Charitable Funds’ Promising Innovations Program. This program provides monetary grants from the Lloyd Lewis Fund, seeking to provide seed money for advances in services and programs serving older adults throughout the United States. Recent grantees have been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Flagstaff, Arizona; Prescott Valley, Arizona among other places.
In Nora’s words, this program allows Kendal to reach “to the wider world and exemplifies our mission of ‘Together, transforming the experience of aging®.’” Another reason Nora so strongly supports Promising Innovations: Lloyd Lewis was her mentor as Kendal’s founding Executive Director. She describes him as a “creative and innovative” person who was constantly looking for new things to do and ways to improve.
As a leader in accreditation programs in the life plan community space, he understood the utility public relations could provide in terms of “proactively [sharing] the good news about aging services.” Kendal’s impact in its community and the world at large is extremely important to Nora. For this reason, she chose to suggest that those who are interested in recognizing her retirement make gift to the Promising Innovations program.
Continuing to Serve
Nora is looking forward to her retirement in early May 2022. However, she is not going to let that get in the way of her community service. She says there are “a couple of organizations” she would like to “do more with.” Among these is Episcopal Community Services, a Philadelphia based organization that is looking to reduce and eliminate poverty.
Beyond volunteer activities, Nora hopes to travel, COVID allowing.
Thank you, Nora for your dedicated support of Kendal, Kendal Charitable Funds and your greater community!