Highlights

Everlasting Life Lessons

I truly enjoy volunteering with you all and wanted to let you know what an amazing impact THBR has had on me. One of the patients I visited frequently taught me lessons I will never forget, and I feel truly blessed to have been in her life for that short period of time. You all are a wonderful group of people and truly make a difference in the lives of the patients, but in the lives of volunteers as well.

My experience with The Hospice of Baton Rouge – with a patient and a family in particular – was invaluable to me. It solidified my decision to pursue the path to becoming a physician and has taught me more in these few months than I could ever hope to learn in my four years as an undergraduate. Your friendship, encouragement, and support has meant the world to me. 

I absolutely recommend anyone, young or older, to volunteer for this organization. THBR offers a wide variety of volunteer positions for any and every type of person. Volunteering at this organization has changed me as a person, for the better. I feel incredibly blessed to have been able to be a part of what this organization has done and I hope to one day be able to give back to it in other ways as well. 

It is truly a privilege to build relationships with patients. I felt very appreciated and useful, as if I was truly making a difference in the patients’ last days of their lives. I enjoy visiting the patients. I honestly wish I could have been a bigger part of The Hospice of Baton Rouge and had gotten more involved if my schedule had allowed me to do so. I was given ample opportunities to volunteer for the organization. 

– Victoria Lassiegne


The Hospice of Baton Rouge was a God-send for me. It not only gave me something to do, but it also made me feel useful again. I feel like I am helping others in need and that makes me feel like I am “giving back” and making a contribution. I feel like I have a purpose.

Gene Shelburne

Genuine People Who Care

I became a Hospice volunteer because I needed what hospice offered. Now, after five years, I continue because it is satisfying to contribute to a unique community service, one that is greatly needed and is not performed by any other organization.

In 1988 my first wife died of cancer, without benefit of hospice care. That experience was for me the most powerful evidence of the need for the Hospice program of support for patients and families dealing with the progression and the aftermath of a terminal illness. I needed help, but like many persons in grief, I was unable to ask for it in a direct, uncomplicated way. But I must have had a sense that there was help somewhere in the Hospice organization; so I volunteered, without fully understanding why I was doing it. Fortunately for me, the Hospice staff understood, found work that I could do, and gave me a very supportive sense of participation in the organization.

I began by doing clerical work; I liked it and have continued doing it on a regular basis, along with occasional special tasks like bulk mailings or publicity photographs or pick-up and delivery of medicines or equipment. The needs that first brought me to the Hospice organization have diminished. Now it is more a need to "do something" for families in the situation that my family was in five years ago. I actually look forward each week to Wednesday, when I will go in and see what there is for me to do. Some weeks there is not a lot, other weeks there is a great deal; occasionally there is more than I can finish. But every week, no matter how much or how little I do, there is a genuine pleasure in associating with a fine group of dedicated professionals and in knowing that I am helping, at least a little, to keep the nurses and social workers in the homes where patients and families are coping with terminal illness.

- Otis B. Wheeler


Thank you for allowing me to volunteer at hospice. Because of the patients, I have found an interest in neuroscience and will be majoring in it!

Tram Ngo​