• Who We Are
  • Your Hospice of Choice
  • Bringing Help & Hope
  • Our Staff
  • Our Board
  • Our Volunteers
  • Our Service Area
• Our Services
  • End-of-Life Care
  • Grief Support
  • Children's Grief
  • Community Education
  • Spanish Speaking Teams
  • Common Questions
• Admissions
  • Knowing When It's Time
  • Criteria for Admission
  • Admission Process
• End-of-Life Tools
  • For Families
  • For Medical Providers

Who We Are

Volunteers Share a Common Bond

Hospice volunteers want to make a difference.

Hospice volunteers come from many backgrounds and have a range of life experiences.  They are male, female, young, old, business people, retail clerks, truck drivers, social workers, nurses and more.

Regardless of their backgrounds, hospice volunteers share the common bonds of being compassionate and caring. And perhaps more than anything else, they want to make a difference that really matters.

 

Personal Experiences with Death

Very often (though not always) people become hospice volunteers because of something to do with their own experiences with death.

Hospice volunteer Karl Marlow, who volunteered with Hospice of The Gorge as well as the Klickitat Valley Hospice, for many years, began his volunteer work at a hospice in the Portland metropolitan area.  Karl, pictured to the right and top of this page, explains:

"Several years ago, my brother went on hospice service at Legacy Hopewell Hospice House in Portland. I was very impressed with the skill level of the people there, and with the type of treatments they offered.

"I had never seen that type of caring before ... so deep, so committed. It was the way they walked us through the process ... and the nurturing and care they gave to my brother and to the family that really impressed me.

"I was amazed by the way hospice brought in all of the different services ... different services for different people.  They seemed to know just what each patient wanted and needed."

The Need to Make a Difference

One of the main forces behind why people continue to volunteer for hospice has to do with the satisfication they get about being able to make a difference.  Karl explains:

"I would never butt in with my own personal beliefs because that's not the hospice way . . . We always went first and foremost with what the patient wanted, and we geared what we did to their needs.

". . . I felt I was able to really make a difference, especially with men, who generally find it difficult to open up."

 

Become a Volunteer

Please click here to learn more about how to become a volunteer for Hospice of The Gorge.