Our New Name

How We Found Our Center

Brattleboro Area Hospice is a beloved community resource that has provided solace to our neighbors, friends, and family as they suffer through illness, death, and grieving. We are the helpers, the hands, the listeners, and the quiet witnesses. 

In our many years, this organization has stayed true to a tradition that is as old as humanity itself. As we now expand our compassionate and quiet activism to helping individuals who have received a life-changing diagnosis with our new Serious Illness Program, it feels like our name no longer encompasses all we do.

The renaming committee has worked to find a name that holds everything we do. The first idea was to reconsider the use of “Brattleboro” as only one town in Windham County. This led us to distilling all we provide into words. We thought about what our diverse clients are needing and wanting as well as understanding what we are offering in its most essential form. We also needed to know what success looked like, so we built a rubric to plug names into and see how they fit all that we do. 

We're very excited to share that we've come to a name that we believe invites connection, opens conversation, feels engaging, honors both the sacred and the practical, and is boldly human: Center for Solace.

The word Center reflects the gravitas of our work. We are a well-run, well-trained organization that has survived the closure of so many other volunteer hospices around the country. We are thriving and this name feels rich in stability. In addition, there is a center to all of our work; we help people find their center as they navigate challenging times in their lives.

Solace was a word that came up a number of times as the foundation of what we are offering. Through all the volunteer hours, through all the grief counseling, through all our advanced care planning work, the golden thread is solace: providing comfort and consolation in a time of distress or sadness. This word is positive and compassionate, as are we. We're excited about this name and about the identity that will grow around it and through it. 

In order to ease the transition into this name, we've chosen a tagline that will go underneath it which is: illness, hospice, grief. This will help to clarify the nature of the work we do and reflects our continued commitment to hospice, the heart of why we were founded in 1979.

Our core mission remains the same, and all of our current services will continue uninterrupted.  Hospice remains at the heart of what we do.  We simply need to call ourselves by a name that better encompasses all of our endeavors.  Over the next few months, we will be working on developing a new logo and website, with a goal of announcing our new name to the public in January 2025.

Center for Solace is who we are and what we provide. The name was just waiting for us to find it.