DONOR PROFILE
Eileen Hosey
DONOR SINCE:
2016
WHY I GIVE: I
came across a copy of FORUM magazine at work, and I read it and I thought, “Well, this is wonderful! I would like to keep getting this magazine. I think I’ll become a donor!” There are other reasons, too: I really support the humanities, anything to do with cultural diversity and information about culture and the arts in our state.
How do you practice the humanities in your own life?
Photo by Laura Hosey
Quilts and the Humanities EILEEN HOSEY dreamed of Alaska from early childhood. Growing up in Seattle, she listened to her father’s stories of being a fisherman in Juneau in the 1930s. She was bitterly disappointed when, in 1955, a chance for the family to move to Alaska fell through. Finally, in 1970, Hosey stepped off the ferry in Juneau and knew she’d never call anywhere else home. She raised her three children there, earned a liberal arts degree in Alaska Studies at UAS, and built a career in medical office business management. In 2006, Hosey retired to help care for a newborn grandchild. When the child was ready to go off to kindergarten, Hosey decided to go back to work. She found a part-time job at Catholic Community Service in Juneau, in the Southeast Senior Services division. There, she blends her experience in office management with her love for the humanities, developing programs for vulnerable seniors who want to stay in their homes and be independent. In her spare time, Hosey makes quilts for friends and charities, and she plays the marimba.
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A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S U M M E R 2017
One of my hobbies is making quilts with a group of ladies here in Juneau—we call ourselves the Monday Night Quilters. Every year we give some quilts to the Office of Children’s Services. They’ve developed a ceremony where, when children are getting adopted, they get a quilt as part of their adoption ceremony at the courthouse. Also, for the last ten years, a friend and I have been showing fourth graders how to make quilts. We go to one or two classes in the spring, talk to them about the history of quilting, about how practical and necessary quilts always were, and show them how they’re put together. I pick out a simple design, and those fourth graders sit down and each sews a block. Then the class votes where they want the quilt to go—to an elder, to a chronically ill child, to their teacher, to the library. It is just amazing when those kids see the finished product; they cannot believe what they have created as a group. I always remind them, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We’ve also been making quilts for a project in Juneau called Housing First. It’s for vulnerable seniors with substance abuse problems. The philosophy used to be, “get sober, get a job, get a place to live;” but for homeless people who don’t have a place to live, it’s difficult, if not impossible. So, we are building from the ground up, finding units for these people to live in. And we’ve started making quilts for them. Homeless people need some beauty in their lives too, and they need to know that we want them to be warm and out of the weather. What do you find most rewarding about your work with Southeast Senior Services?
I get to see the connection of older people to their families and to their communities; who is connected and who is disconnected.
My job is to reconnect the people to their families and to their communities and help them become a part of it again. That’s the real challenge, and the most important part. Part of my job involves going to Angoon on the southwesterly tip of Admiralty Island, as a care coordinator or case manager. It’s so small, several hundred people, and such a sense of community there. I’ve been so fortunate to be a part of so many of the elders’ lives. I just treasure going there. Then I have clients in Juneau who have lived here since the forties, and they tell stories about the myths of the Alaskan experience, and how that has fed into their lives. They are so rich in experience here in prestate Alaska, statehood, and beyond. I tell almost every single client, you ought to write a book! You have done a lot of work in healthcare throughout your career. Many people might not instantly associate the healthcare field with the humanities. Do you think the two overlap?
I think there’s a tremendous overlap. Our clients start talking about their lives, and then we mirror back to them how important their lives have been and what they’ve accomplished. There is such beauty in these older people. We honor them as human beings, and that’s the goal of my organization. The art of life, that’s what it is. There was one client I had, an older lady who was mostly bedridden, but she loved to sing. One day I went to see her and she was really sad because she had heard that her sister down in Seattle was in the process of dying. So I said, “Nancy, let’s sit here and let’s sing your sister to heaven.” She cheered right up; so we got out the song books and we sat and sang old hymns, Appalachian tunes, everything you could think of, for two hours. It was the longest home visit I’d ever done, and her sister passed away that evening. I re-