Every week, staff members at Good Shepherd Community Care competed for the privilege of driving Theresa Nicolazzo home.
The elderly woman lived with physical challenges and ongoing health needs. For her to volunteer at the Newton-based hospice’s offices, someone had to pick her up at her house, work carefully with her on appropriate tasks, and then drive her home again. For staff, it would have been easier to politely decline her offer.
Instead, they made her part of the family.
Workers brought her Christmas presents, left stockings on her doorstep, and invited her to their homes for holiday dinners. When she died in November 2011, CEO Tim Boon choked up at her memorial as he described how much she had given the organization.
“By the time she left us, she had given so much of herself that it felt as though we’d given part of ourselves to her, too,” said Meg Lutze, chief operating officer. “We were all so willing to go out of our way to make this woman’s life better that she ended up making ours better, too.”
Staff members say Nicolazzo’s life and service captured something essential about Good Shepherd Community Care, an institution that has supported families through illness, dying, and grief since 1978. For nearly five decades, through tremendous growth and change, members of the nonprofit say one thread remains constant: treating every person with dignity, meeting them exactly where they are, and refusing to turn anyone away.
An English model and an American dream
The story of Good Shepherd began, fittingly, with an act of compassion that crossed an ocean.
In the late 1970s, members of the Parish of the Good Shepherd learned about the revolutionary hospice movement emerging in England. St. Christopher’s Hospice in London had pioneered a new idea: that dying people deserved specialized, compassionate care focused on comfort rather than cure — and that communities could organize to support their own.
A group of parishioners believed Newton needed something similar. Led by the pastor’s wife and including psychiatrist Dr. Philip Kelleher of McLean Hospital and the Rev. Alfred Zadig, they hired Linda Kilburn in 1978 to conduct a feasibility study.
Kilburn spent months interviewing administrators at Newton-Wellesley Hospital and the Visiting Nurse Association, researching the English model, and calculating startup costs.
Newton-Wellesley Hospital donated office space in the Ellison Building. The small program assembled a core team of nurses, a physician, social workers, and volunteers who provided direct patient support, administrative help, and fundraising.
And the Hospice of the Good Shepherd opened its doors in the fall of 1979 – the first hospice in Massachusetts.
Kilburn applied for — and won — one of only 26 national demonstration grants from the federal Healthcare Financing Administration in the 1980s. The research generated by that project helped establish the Medicare hospice benefit that later made hospice care accessible to millions of Americans.
What impressed Kilburn most in those early years was not the medical innovation or the federal breakthroughs. It was the people.
“What impressed me most was the resilience of the human spirit under unthinkable or unanticipated circumstances,” she said. “Humans have a lot of resilience and reserves if they have enough support to tap into them.”
That belief — that dying people and their families possess profound strength when properly supported — became the organization’s ethos. Good Shepherd committed to serving anyone who met medical eligibility criteria, regardless of ability to pay. Interdisciplinary teams of nurses, social workers, chaplains, and volunteers focused on pain management, emotional support, and bereavement, recognizing that losing a loved one affects entire families.
Nearly 50 years later, those values remain unchanged.
Consistent mission
“Whenever I’m explaining a change that is taking place, I have to be able to explain it well in the context of advancing our mission,” said Boon, who has been CEO of Good Shepherd for 18 years and working in hospice for more than 30. “If I can’t, then I’m not gonna pursue that change. It’s all or nothing for the people we serve.”
That commitment was tested repeatedly, and most dramatically, during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the virus struck in early 2020, many Massachusetts hospices refused to accept COVID-positive patients, wary of risk.
Good Shepherd made a different choice.
“If you look back at the early days of hospice, it was right around AIDS,” Boon said. “And those same fears people had were going on about people with AIDS, and it was those hospices that jumped in and said, ‘We’re going to take good care of those folks.’ Those were the hospices I admired. That was the hospice we had to be.”
Hospitals were overwhelmed. Many patients were intubated against their wishes, spending their final days in isolation. Good Shepherd became the only hospice in the area accepting COVID-positive patients.
“We felt our responsibility to the community was such that we had to help people get out of the hospital, and we had to help people who did not want to go to the hospital,” Boon said.
Dr. Dave Clive, a retired nephrologist and longtime volunteer, said the decision exemplified the organization’s character.
“Our mission is to deliver compassionate care to virtually all in need, regardless of who they are or what their background is,” Clive said. “And to do it with integrity and compassion.”
Growth without compromise
Good Shepherd has grown dramatically since those early years in donated hospital space.
When Meg Lutze arrived in 2003, the census of patients hovered around 15. Today, the organization supports more than 300 hospice patients and has served over 2,000 as of 2025. Its service area has expanded from Newton to 45 communities.
And its services have expanded just as dramatically.
The organization later acquired Heartplay and Camp Erin, children’s bereavement programs now marking their 30th year. In 2012, Good Shepherd added pediatric palliative care through a Massachusetts program that allowed children with serious illness to receive hospice-style support while continuing treatment. Adult palliative care for those not on Medicare followed in 2015. Good Shepherd has launched multicultural programs for Russian-, Chinese- and Spanish-speaking communities.
In July, Good Shepherd joined GUIDE, a Medicare pilot program for dementia care. The organization also offers the Miriam Boyd Parlin House — a 10-bed hospice residence — to care for patients who have no living accommodations or families able to support them.
Along the way, the organization also expanded its name to Good Shepherd Community Care to reflect the mission of the Hospice of the Good Shepherd and its palliative care programs.
Despite these changes, staff members hold true to the core values of compassion and care.
“They were the people who Zoomed into my wedding in the middle of COVID,” said Jennifer Sax, Good Shepherd’s vice president of advancement, describing the small ceremony she and her husband held in their living room after 15 years together. “They are my family. We are there for each other for births, deaths, and everything in between.”
Diana Gaillardetz, a hospice social worker, said she did not hesitate to choose Good Shepherd when her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She had been an intern at the time, but the care her husband received confirmed everything she believed about the organization.
“There wasn’t any question,” she said. “It’s not just a job. It’s this seamless connection between families and their loved ones and making sure we believe in the person first.”
Good Shepherd has been named one of Massachusetts’ Best Places to Work by the Boston Globe for the last four years. In the Globe’s 2025 rankings, surrounded by real estate, construction and technology companies, Good Shepherd ranked 11th, the only hospice to make the large employer rankings.
“We have had consistently some of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with,” Clive said. “And I have had a long, long career in medicine.”
Comprehensive individualization
Ask anyone at Good Shepherd to define its approach, and they describe the same principle: comprehensive individualization.
“Care means whatever the recipient of that care needs it to mean,” Lutze said. “Meeting people where they’re at, differentiating our services, so that hospice, palliative care, or grief support looks different for every person.”
Chelsea Shenker, vice president of palliative and serious illness care, said every interaction begins with curiosity.
“It’s about sitting down and asking every single person, whether they’re patient or family, ‘What is most important to you? Who are you beyond your name, date of birth, and diagnosis? What makes a good day?’” she said. “Instead of coming in with a template, it’s about walking with them and shepherding them along the path.”
That often requires staff to tolerate their own discomfort, Lutze said. Many elderly patients made choices their care teams considered unsafe — refusing overnight help despite repeated falls, living alone in conditions that unsettled clinicians.
“Our job is to make sure they understand their options, understand the consequences of their decisions, and then tolerate our own discomfort,” she said. “This is not our life or our death. It’s theirs.”
The results of that type of care are extraordinary.
When a woman at Parlin House wanted to continue her family’s tradition of attending the Big E fair after her husband died, staff made it happen, even though she required oxygen and could not move independently. They arranged transportation, equipment, and a wheelchair. More than a dozen family members met her there.
Sax recalled helping a widow whose husband’s final wish had been to swim. Though he required a wheelchair, staff helped him into the pool at his condo one last time, floating him through the water.
Boon remembered a young father and his children, 12 and 15, whose wife had died of cancer. Through Good Shepherd’s Heartplay bereavement program, the family found a new identity.
“Strong,” Boon said. “They said their family was strong. Seeing that full circle, going from devastation to a family identity that they felt good about, that was the most powerful feeling in the world.”
The nonprofit difference
Good Shepherd operates as a nonprofit in a growing hospice landscape that includes for-profit providers.
The distinction matters, staff said again and again.
“We do not consider the economic burden of our patients,” Clive said.
Gaillardetz described a time when staff cared for an unhoused man and brought him to Parlin House for his final week of life so he could die clean, comfortable, and cared for, despite having no one to reimburse the organization.
“He only had a week, but we loved him beyond his circumstances,” she said. “The nonprofit part is that we have people giving a lot of their time because we believe in the person first. It’s not about the money.”
The same holds true after death. Bereavement services are required by hospice regulations, but Good Shepherd offers services beyond what’s required. They employ bereavement counselors, run support groups, make follow-up calls even years after a family’s members death, and host an Evening of Remembrance for families of those who have died twice a year.
For Lutze, the vision is not simply growth but adaptability.
“We just need to be whatever the community needs us to be,” she said. “Our job is to keep the organization healthy and adaptable, so we can pivot to meet those needs.”
Shenker hopes Good Shepherd’s approach would become a model beyond hospice and palliative care.
“We used to have doctors making house calls by horse and buggy,” she said. “We’ve made huge medical advances, but we’ve lost a lot of humanity in between. I think that humanity is brought back in the work Good Shepherd does.”
Gaillardetz recalls caring for a woman at North Hill Senior Living who had been one of the original volunteers at Good Shepherd. Decades earlier, she had worked to convince reluctant physicians to accept hospice patients, long before the Medicare benefit existed.
“She told me over and over the stories of her volunteering,” she said. “They were so important to her. It was a part of who she was.”
She asked Boon to visit, and he met with a woman who had helped begin the hospice movement.
“I kept telling her, ‘This is what we’re doing now, and it’s all because of the work you and others did in the beginning,’” Gaillardetz said.
That continuity — from a borrowed hospital office enlisting the help of a few volunteers to comprehensive services across more than forty communities, from 15 patients to hundreds, and from early volunteers to more than 100 today — represents Good Shepherd’s greatest achievement. It has grown and evolved without abandoning the vision of the parishioners who believed communities should care for their own.
Kilburn, once a founding member, still stays in touch with Good Shepherd’s leadership.
“I’ll remember the huge difference we made for people dealing with end-of-life issues,” she said, “Not just the patient who is dying, but the extended family. It’s what we carry to today.”
Parker Maslowski is a junior majoring in journalism at Boston University. His work for Fig City News is through the BU Newsroom program, which pairs students with local news organizations.
