Kentucky’s Nazareth Home announced in mid-September that Carrie Burns has been hired as its new director of development. Burns will lead the organization as it further develops the Nazareth Homes Foundation.
Burns has more than 20 years of nonprofit experience, having held leadership roles with nonprofits Wesley Manor Retirement Community, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Kentucky chapter, the Kentucky Humane Society and St. Paul United Methodist Church.
Most recently, she served as vice president of development for Wesley Manor. Burns holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hanover College.
Mary Haynes, president and CEO of Nazareth Home, said Burns adds great leadership to the team, bringing decades of experience and a passion for elder care to the role.
“Carrie comes to this role with a commitment to serve and a gift of cultivating donor relationships,” Haynes said. “We’re very excited to have Carrie on our team. Our board and leadership are excited to have her join Nazareth Home and know that her longstanding passion for working in the nonprofit sphere and her devotion to elder care will add great depth to our mission and ministry.”
Nazareth Homewas established in 1976 as a healthcare ministry sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. It is a 5-Star rated long-term care and rehabilitation organization with two campuses in Louisville.
Nazareth Home announced Wednesday that Carrie Burns has been hired as its new director of development.
In the role, Burns will lead the organization as it further develops the Nazareth Homes Foundation, according to a news release.
Mary Haynes, president and CEO of Nazareth Home, said Burns adds great leadership to the team, bringing decades of experience and a passion for elder care to the role.
“Carrie comes to this role with a commitment to serve and a gift of cultivating donor relationships,” Haynes said in the release. “We’re very excited to have Carrie on our team. Our board and leadership are excited to have her join Nazareth Home and know that her longstanding passion for working in the nonprofit sphere and her devotion to elder care will add great depth to our mission and ministry.”
Burns brings more than 20 years of nonprofit experience to the position, working in leadership roles with nonprofits including the Kentucky Humane Society, St. Paul United Methodist Church, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (Kentucky Chapter) and more. She most recently served as vice president of development for Wesley Manor Retirement Community.
“It’s an honor to be part of the Nazareth Home team, fulfilling the call to be a mission-driven leader in senior care for our community,” Burns said. “The person-centered care philosophy, innovative technologies, and dedication to quality care make Nazareth Home a truly unique and special place.”
Nazareth Home is one of the area’s largest aging care employers, ranking No. 8 in Louisville Business First’s latest research with nearly 370 local employees in 2022, and operates two of the largest long-term care facilities in the area.
Nazareth Home names Carrie Burns as new Director of Development
Burns brings two decades of nonprofit experience to leadership role
Nazareth Home is excited to announce that Carrie Burns has been hired as its new director of development. Burns will lead the organization as it further develops the Nazareth Homes Foundation.
Mary Haynes, president/CEO of Nazareth Home, said Burns adds great leadership to the team, bringing decades of experience and a passion for elder care to the role.
“Carrie comes to this role with a commitment to serve and a gift of cultivating donor relationships,” said Haynes. “We’re very excited to have Carrie on our team. Our board and leadership are excited to have her join Nazareth Home and know that her longstanding passion for working in the nonprofit sphere and her devotion to elder care will add great depth to our mission and ministry.”
Burns brings more than 20 years of nonprofit experience to the position, working in leadership roles with nonprofits including the Kentucky Humane Society, St. Paul United Methodist Church, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (Ky Chapter), and more. She most recently served as vice president of development for Wesley Manor Retirement Community.
“It’s an honor to be part of the Nazareth Home team, fulfilling the call to be a mission-driven leader in
senior care for our community,” Burns said. “The person-centered care philosophy, innovative technologies, and dedication to quality care make Nazareth Home a truly unique and special place.”
Nazareth Home President/CEO Mary Haynes discusses employee culture amid ‘Best Places to Work’ recognition
Nazareth Home was recognized by Louisville Business First as one of the Best Places to Work in Greater Louisville for 2022. In addition to providing person-centered health and wellness services for individuals and families, one of Nazareth Home’s top priorities has always been to foster a positive work culture in which employees are valued and fulfilled in their career.
In light of this honor, Nazareth Home President/CEO Mary Haynes was recently interviewed by Lisa Benson, President and Publisher of Louisville Business First, for the business journal’s “Executive Insights” online video series. During the interview, Haynes discusses the strategic leadership factors behind Nazareth Home’s employee culture.
Haynes explains that as an organization sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Nazareth Home embodies the charisms of the sisters, one of which is “hospitality.” At Nazareth Home, this extends not only to acceptance of an individual, but also acceptance of their unique views, choices and perspectives.
“That is very important to us, and we’re very proud that it is picked up on by people who both come to visit here and by the people who live and work here,” she said.
A key foundation for building a positive employee culture at Nazareth Home is emphasizing trust among employees. Haynes said this starts with having integrity in leadership.
“Everything we do at Nazareth Home, every action we take is to build trust and integrity and strong relationships,” she said.
Effective communication is also key, Haynes said. She said this became especially evident amid COVID-19, as new safety precautions were implemented and multiple modes of communication were implemented to keep employees, elders and their families up-to-date.
“Our communication really stepped up because we were 100 percent dependent on each other,” she said. “Plus, we had to keep the elders informed and we had to keep their families informed. Communication became a daily priority and I think that transparency and the accountability we used during that time positioned us to be where we are today.”
In addition to experiencing a great employee culture, employees at Nazareth Home also are provided with competitive pay, exceptional benefits and rewarding interactions with the elders they serve. Those interested in learning about career opportunities at Nazareth Home’s two Louisville campuses can visit nazhome.org/careers.
Nazareth Home was recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in Greater Louisville for 2022. In this video, CEO Mary Haynes talks with Louisville Business First Publisher Lisa Benson about how culture is a strategic priority for her team, and she shares the key ingredients of the strong and positive culture and the role she and her leadership play in keeping employees engaged.
ABOUT THE LIST For the Best Places to Work program, employees of nominated companies are asked to complete a Quantum Workplace survey.
The Quantum Workplace Best Places to Work survey measures 10 key engagement categories. Companies are ranked by a proprietary calculation. Quantum Workplace conducted confidential online surveys with employees of nominees to measure employee attitudes across themes.
Companies are ranked and finalists are chosen in each size category according to their overall score.
In 2019, iN2L co-founder Jack York celebrated two birthdays: his 60th and iN2L’s 20th. This called for more than your average celebration. To mark the milestone, York embarked on a tour of senior living communities around the country that use iN2L’s technology. At each stop, he took a group of residents out in his van, Carpool Karaoke-style, asking his passengers about their lives and singing some of their favorite tunes.
The 60/20 Tour, York recalled in a presentation at the Senior Living Innovation Forum in Napa, was partly a way of thanking the communities he serves. “It was all based on gratitude,” he said. “I was just so grateful.” (It didn’t hurt that his colleagues wanted him to leave the office for six months). During his presentation, he shared memories and videos of residents he met during the tour, as well as a few lessons the industry can learn from them.
Flipping the Script on Memory Care For York, the tour was much more than a fun way of getting to know the residents in iN2L’s community. It was a journey of discovery in its own right, one that changed him from the very outset. Going in, he expected that he would spend most of his visits with independent living residents rather than those with dementia. When the CEO of Nazareth Home Mary Haynes steered him past the community’s independent living unit to its memory care unit, however, he realized the error in his thinking. “It was astounding to me, someone who’s been living in this industry for 20 years, and [with] a product that’s impacted thousands of people living with dementia, that I still had my own prejudice,” he said. “So we really flipped the script and wound up specifically focusing on people living with dementia.”
He quickly gained a new appreciation for the seniors iN2L serves: people like the retired truckers at an adult day program in Pennsylvania who lit up whenever they passed a truck on the road—“they would talk about how many lug nuts were on that tire, and what the size engine was”—or the tech-savvy New Jersey resident with blue hair and three computers (a Mac, a PC, and an iPad). “I wasn’t burdened by trying to make somebody who they were 30 years ago,” York reflected. “It was just about the joy of who they were in the moment.”
Heroes and Sweethearts That joy often revealed glimpses of the deeper humanity beneath it. A resident’s story about hunting caribou in Alaska gave way to an emotional reflection on how he gave his house to his daughter: “I gave it to them and I said, they need it more than I do,” he told York. Another resident, a retired pilot, ushered York into his room, where he kept the plaque United Airlines gave him for shipping supplies to Ground Zero after 9/11. “That’s who he was,” York realized. “He was the 9/11 hero. He wasn’t a 92-year-old guy kind of struggling with dementia.”
Another one of the tour’s more touching moments came as York drove around a resident living with dementia and his wife, who described the challenges and grief of their journey together. When Bing Crosby’s “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” came on the radio, her husband suddenly perked up out of his reverie and started singing to her—and she, of course, sang right back, just like they used to. “I felt kind of odd filming it,” York said, “but it was the coolest thing.”
Find Your Tap Dancers York came out of his journey with a few lessons for his colleagues in the senior living industry. To those who live by the axiom of marketing to seniors’ adult daughters, he cited a resident who enthused over her community’s cloth napkins. “Don’t underestimate what your residents are paying attention to,” he said. “I don’t need no adult daughter to tell me that I like my cloth napkins.”
Then York played a video of a resident in Canada who used to perform tap routines at movie theaters—back in the days when previews were a little less commercial. As they returned to the community after their drive, he asked if she could put on a show. It so happened that she had her old tap shoes in her room. “She hadn’t tap danced in 35 years, ’cause nobody asked her,” York said. “She had her shoes just waiting in the closet for somebody to ask her to tap dance.”
The 60/20 tour may be over, but the journey has only just begun. York’s next step will be TaleGate: a cross-country journey in a 42-foot trailer with a high-end recording studio inside. TaleGate will be traveling the country, hosting “tailgate” parties for residents and capturing videos of both residents and staff. In addition, through a partnership with Saltbox TV, TaleGate will be hosting a monthly reality tv show (on Saltbox) that will highlight one resident a month. The residents will not know that the TaleGate team has prepared a “This Is Your Life” inspired event, by assembling an audience of people they influenced throughout their lives. “You’ve got a 90-year-old woman that was the fifth-grade school teacher for 40 years,” he suggested as an example. “I’m gonna be interviewing her in the studio, and unbeknownst to her, we’ll get a bunch of her students that are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, gathering outside the trailer. And we’ll just walk her outside and look at the lives that she had changed.”
In closing, York asked his colleagues to keep doing everything they can to honor their residents. “You’ve got tap dancers in your communities,” he said. “Find your tap dancers.”
