Greg Schneider HEAL Project Founding Director Full Bio

Greg Schneider has been directly involved with hospice as a volunteer caregiver at the bedside of the dying since 1996. His experience has given him the insight to see that compassionate care starts with first intimately knowing ourselves and then having a good understanding of the nature of the dying person's journey. From there the uncertainties can be minimized, allowing us to give care in a more tender and loving manner.

Greg has served as a volunteer caregiver with numerous hospices in Northern California since 1996. He has served at the Zen Hospice Project and the George Mark Children's House in the San Francisco Bay Area. He presently volunteers with Memorial Hospice, Hospice of Petaluma, Heartland Hospice and Sutter VNA in Sonoma County in Northern California. He serves at the bedside and plays the harp for his patients and for various hospice-related events. He is a counselor for the Hospice of Petaluma’s bereavement group for children who have lost a parent as well as for the Children’s Cancer Community support group, which supports families whose children have cancer.

In 2008 Greg established the Hospice Community Forum (HCF), which is a rapidly growing venue for the entire hospice community to network on critical issues relating to the important work that the community does as well as stimulating professional growth through better communication.

The HEAL Project's long term goal to create a Hospice Volunteer Training Institute (HVTI), an online training program for hospice volunteers and managers, is moving closer to reality. The creation of the National Council on Hospice Volunteer Education (NCHVE) provides that basis upon which to build a credible national training program. This council is made up of national visionaries that will be guiding the development of the HVTI curriculum. It is the goal of the HEAL Project to make HVTI a vehicle for change that will allow our society to harvest and retain more compassionate caregivers from our communities. Through academic and experiential contributions from the hospice community at large, we are developing a broad curriculum of courses that will raise hospice volunteer education to new heights.

Greg was selected by Johns Hopkins University to be a member of the Interdisciplinary Palliative Care Delegation to China and Tibet in October 2006. The goal of this delegation was to understand how medical care was practiced in China and Tibet, both traditional and western approaches, and to see how these countries had developed their palliative and end-of-life care services.

In 2005 Greg founded the Hospice Volunteer Association (HVA), which is now the world’s leading association for Hospice Volunteers and Managers. HVA was created with the goal of Encouraging Excellence in Hospice Volunteering Through Education and Communication. Since its inception, HVA has introduced several new, innovative and unique services that benefit the hospice community such as the National Hospice Document Repository and the Patient Data Vault.

In January of 2003 Greg began authoring and publishing the HEAL Project online Information Letter Series as a public service to educate the general public about hospice and to promote more public dialogue on death and dying issues. This program is part of the HEAL Project's Community Outreach Program in Education (COPE). The program has been well received by the public and by hospice organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

In early 2003 he began development of the HEAL Project's Hannah's Friends program, which provides experienced hospice volunteers to support families who have a child with a life-threatening illness. The program's volunteers are available to support families in numerous ways: in their homes, hospitals and in residential hospice facilities. Their primary purpose is to support and guide families through this most difficult time when their child is dying and then to support them beyond their loss. The pilot program for Hannah’s Friends is ongoing in Sonoma County of Northern California.

Greg has been a guest on Grace Cathedral's LightWorks TV program (KRON-TV Ch4 San Francisco) to discuss the role of the hospice volunteer and the importance of hospice to the community. He also was the featured guest on San Francisco's KGO radio talk show to discuss hospice and the differences between curative and palliative care as well as answering questions from the show host and KGO listeners.

He often plays the harp for hospice patients in addition to sitting with them at the bedside, and also lectures and conducts workshops for local schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching students about grief, loss and other issues related to death and dying.

Greg has a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) from the University of Santa Clara and a Bachelor's degree in EE from San Jose State University. He previously founded and managed a successful technical consulting business that served high-tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years.

Black and white photos on this page are copyrighted by A. Raja Hornstein. Photos were taken for the Zen Hospice Project at Laguna Honda Hospital Hospice Unit and the Zen Hospice Guest House, a residential hospice facility. For more information on Zen Hospice, please visit www.zenhospice.org.