A problem-solver who ‘restores your faith in mankind’
S.F. woman’s nonprofit links community members with volunteer in-home caregivers
She wakes before we do, her head full of thoughts and dreams and, well, love. Zero-dark-30 looks and feels like high noon to Glenys Carl because there are things to do and fears to conquer and people to help.
“It just happens,” she says of the predawn brainstorms that have given rise to one of the best ideas to hit Santa Fe since the invention of the Frito pie. “Something pops in and says, ‘Well, try this. Or try that.’ ”
Carl, named as one of The New Mexican’s 10 Who Made a Difference for 2017, hasn’t just tried; she’s triumphed. Her early-morning lightning bolt — a nonprofit called Coming Home Connection — has for the past decade provided free, in-home health care for Santa Fe’s old, infirm, uninsured, poor, dying.
In many ways, Carl’s push to help the least among us gave rise to the best within us.
“She restores your faith in mankind,” says Santa Fe businessman Rick Berardinelli, “because she does everything from the heart.”
Coming Home Connection, founded in 2007, trains volunteers to perform hospice and long-term care in conjunction with a hospice organization for those who can’t do it themselves — or depend on the health care system to do it for them.
Coming Home Connection volunteers, many recruited from the Santa Fe Community College nursing program, are in dozens of homes every week and have helped hundreds through the years for free.
“If you have to pay $10 an hour for 24/7,
that’s $1,680 a week, times four weeks a month, times years, sometimes,” she says, the octave of her Welsh-tinged accent rising. “How can that be? You have to come up with other ways. And, I thought, why don’t they have people come together?
“If I thought of a program, people who have better brains than me can think up a better program,” she continues. “All I did was think, ‘Oh, it would be good to take the nursing school students,’ or ‘It would be good to take the medical school students. They would learn a lot from me before they go into the field.’ ”
Carl, born in Wales during World War II (she declines to give her exact age, but figures we can do the rough math with that factoid), is about as big as a fountain pen. But her build belies her bullish determination. It’s the only reason she’s come this far.
“Mom just sort of focuses on the situation demanding attention, and how do we solve this,” her son Jonathan Carl wrote in an email from his home in Denmark. “This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t get help from others. … But she is one of the few people I know who is very good at ‘asking’ for help because it’s not about bothering a friend or volunteer, or disturbing someone, it’s about putting the needs of someone else who needs help in focus first.”
Pressed for several minutes, Glenys Carl finally acknowledges she’s proud of what Coming Home Connection has done for people. But hubris takes the hindmost.
“I do say, ‘Look what’s happened here, all of us together — look what we did,’ ” she allows. “But I don’t know. It’s … it’s … what about all the people who came together for Scott?”
Ah, yes. Scott. That’s Carl’s late son — the young man whose life and death (but mostly life) helped inspire Coming Home Connection.
Scott Carl — young, strapping, athletic — hadn’t been in Aus- tralia in the late 1980s for very long before suffering a traumatic brain injury and going into a coma for three months. His mother flew to his side, not sure exactly how she — a single mom, knowing exactly no one in the country — would care for him.
But as is her way, she figured it out. Before her first night in Down Under was over, she’d recruited five strangers to help. That’s Glenys Carl. Scott’s death in November 1989 was, and remains, crushing. But Carl says she refuses to be paralyzed by the grief. Knowing that, it shouldn’t be surprising that she’s working to bring a project called Scott’s House — Santa Fe’s first free hospice and respite home — to life.
“I’d like to do the hospice house,” she says, her voice rising again. “I need another $200,000.”
Few doubt her ability to climb that mountain. A killer fundraiser — “You can’t believe how much she could raise just by talking; she’s amazing,” says Jenny Landen, dean of the School of Sciences, Health Engineering and Math at Santa Fe Community College — Carl has enlisted some of the heftiest checkbooks to help. Big hitters like the ConAlma Foundation, the Santa Fe Community Foundation, the New Mexico Community Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Innovation, among many others, have been donors through the years.
“It’s infectious, oh, absolutely,” says Berardinelli, on the board of directors for Coming Home Connection. “You feel a great deal of enthusiasm, the passion for the people she cares for.
“When I got on the board, I thought, ‘Oh, man, this thing runs on faith and hope and Glenys’ energy.’ She just believes it’s going to happen. Just believes it.”