Strong women with vision create Beyond Hospice

The way we view it is that we’re helping our patients get from this life to what’s beyond, to the next place.”

Kerry Keenan

Kerry Keenan and Jill Schoenecker are two friends and longtime colleagues working in hospice care who dreamt of starting their own locally-owned hospice organization where care providers were the ones calling the shots, not out-of-state shareholders.
That dream became Beyond Hospice, a nonprofit providing in-home and inpatient hospice care in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. It is a subsidiary of Episcopal Homes, a senior living community that operates in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood.
In 2022, Schoenecker, Keenan, and a handful of other experienced caregivers – all women – gathered in Schoenecker’s living room to hash out what they wanted for their hospice care organization. Most were former hospice workers from HealthEast (St. Joseph’s Hospital), the local hospital system that merged with Fairview in 2017.
“There were five of us there with a big dream and like, ‘How in the world are we going to pull this off?’” said Schoenecker, Beyond Hospice Director of Clinical Operations. “We sat down and said, how do we want our program to look and what do we want the culture to be like? If we’re able to build this however we want to, what do we want it to look like?”
The one thing they knew for sure was they wanted it to be a nonprofit. They also decided on the name: Beyond Hospice.
“The way we view it is that we’re helping our patients get from this life to what’s beyond, to the next place,” Keenan, now the executive director of Beyond Hospice, said.
In the process of finding support – and funding – for their vision, Beyond Hospice connected with Episcopal Homes. The two organizations had similar roots, as Episcopal Homes, too, was started by a strong group of women back in the late 19th century.
At the time, Episcopal Homes provided everything from independent senior living to nursing home facilities, but they lacked end-of-life care services for their members. Beyond Hospice could fill that gap.
“They were looking for a hospice to complete that continuum of care from independent living to end-of-life,” said Schoenecker.
Just a few short months after that initial brainstorming session in Schoenecker’s living room, the board of Episcopal Homes voted to bring Beyond Hospice under their umbrella. From there, doors kept opening.
“We were moving with velocity,” Schoenecker said.
After acquiring The Pillars Hospice Home in Oakdale, where several staff members, including Keenan, had previously worked, Beyond Hospice began providing care to the community in 2023.
Fast-forward less than three years, and Beyond Hospice has provided care for over 570 patients across the Twin Cities metro, and employs a staff of around 70. They serve an average of around 80 patients at a time.

A FOCUS ON BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT
The focus of Beyond Hospice is on holistic, individualized care, which Schoenecker said means they treat the patient’s “body, mind, and spirit.”
A care team for a Beyond Hospice patient typically includes not only nurses and home health aides, but also social workers, spiritual care advisors, and volunteers who provide additional services like massage and music therapy.
“We want to treat them as a whole person because not only are there physical things going on, you know, during this season of someone’s life, but emotional and spiritual, too,” she said.
Beyond Hospice also provides services and resources for patients’ families.
“Dying is really, really hard and it’s hard for everybody involved,” said Schoenecker. “We recognize that and want to make sure that we provide for what everybody needs.”
Being a locally-based nonprofit means they can tailor their services to fit the different needs of their community, including the different populations of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Right now, for instance, they are building an all-Hmong team of caregivers. Staff have also worked with organizations like SAGE, a national nonprofit that provides services for older LGBTQ+ adults.
“We want to be intentional about that so that we can best serve our community, regardless of someone’s religious beliefs [or] cultural beliefs because there are a lot of unique features or ways of providing end-of-life care based on someone’s culture, race, and spiritual beliefs, certainly,” observed Schoenecker. “The more that we understand about that, the better we can care for them and their families.”

WHAT HOSPICE IS - AND ISN’T
Another of the goals of Beyond Hospice is to provide education about what hospice is – and what it is not.
“We try not to make [hospice] such a scary word and to really let people know that it’s a lot of support and services,” said Schoenecker. “It’s about living your life to the last minute and just helping people feel like they’re still important and they matter and what they’ve done here on Earth matters. Helping people to be seen and heard and loved and that they’re still important and that they matter until their last hour.”

NON-PROFIT HOSPICE GROUPS MORE RARE
Locally-based, nonprofit hospices like Beyond Hospice are becoming increasingly rare. In 2023, nonprofits only made up around a third of hospices in the United States, according to the New York Times. Two decades ago, that number was over 50%.
Keenan and Schoenecker said their experience working at for-profit hospice organizations was what eventually led them to pursue starting their own hospice.
“We’re not chasing proceeds for shareholders. We are doing this for all the right reasons,” said Schoenecker. “We just really want to provide good care and that’s our bottom line.”
“We always say that we don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be the best,” added Schoenecker. “Our goal is not to get so huge like other hospice programs that have in the past kind of gotten too big to really provide that patient and family centered care that we really pride ourselves on being able to do.”
While they hope Beyond Hospice will continue to grow, Keenan and Schoenecker emphasized that the most important thing to them is providing that individualized patient- and family-centered care. That means keeping their staff’s caseload small.
“We don’t want them to feel rushed when they’re visiting our patients and families. We want them to be able to have the time to spend to get everyone what they need. To have a good work-life balance is really important.”
Schoenecker said it has been amazing to see their vision for hospice lived out.
“I think that when you set out to do the right things and you have your heart in it and if you set out to do good work that you’re going to be successful,” she said. “I truly believe that something extraordinary happened that day in my living room.”
More at https://www.beyondhospicemn.org/.