Keuka Comfort Care Home Recipient of ’07 Stork Award

The 2007 Donald and Corinne Stork Award for Community Service will be presented to the Keuka Comfort Care Home at a noon luncheon Tuesday, Oct. 9, in the Geiser Refectory at Keuka College.Keuka College established the award to recognize those individuals who exemplify its historic commitment to the value and benefit of using individual initiative for the common good. The award was named after Penn Yan residents Donald and Corinne Stork, the first recipients of the award in 1991.Individual initiative was the driving force behind the construction of the Keuka Comfort Care Home, a hospice-care facility located on East Lake Road in Penn Yan. Friends of two women with terminal cancer who lived at a comfort care home in Clifton Springs and a hospice facility in Naples—30 and 60 miles from Penn Yan, respectively—got the ball rolling.“Daily trips to these facilities were physically and emotionally draining for the women’s husbands,” said Bill Kays, chairman of the Keuka Comfort Care Home Board of Directors. “So, their friends began looking into the possibility of establishing a small, hospice-like facility in the Penn Yan area that would serve terminally-ill adults and children free-of-charge.”Thanks to the generosity of local residents—in the form of money, materials, time, and labor—Penn Yan now has that facility: a two-bed comfort care home that provides free care to terminally-ill people in Yates County with a life expectancy of three months or less.The start-up committee included Bill (chairman) and Rosalie McEvily, Bill and Nancy Kays, Tom and Betty Rakovan, Bill and Barb Schrouder, Bob and Margo Shaw, and Rick and Jean Thompson. The board of directors: Bill Kays (chair), Bill McEvily (vice chairman), Betty Rakovan (treasurer), Rick Thompson (secretary), Sue Anderson, Jim Carey, Cathy Cannariato, Carole Jensen, Ann Martini, Steve Henry, and Steve Heller.The staff is led by Donna Payne, director and primary nurse, and includes medical director Dr. Mary Driesch and volunteer coordinators Susan Heller and Leah Hawley.