WINDSOR — In spite of Jill Lord’s retirement earlier this year following three decades at Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center, her influence on the Windsor community is ongoing.

She retired from her position of director of community health at the Windsor critical access community hospital in January. But the Jill Lord Summer Food Drive launched earlier this month and runs through Friday.

She also continues to serve Windsor-area families through Bayada hospice, where Lord, whose retirement was short-lived, has been a part-time social worker since April. In that role, she’s helping to connect families to resources they might need while their loved ones proceed to the end of their lives. To do so, she draws on the many connections she made during her time at Mt. Ascutney.

Lord, a Cornish resident who turned 70 on Monday, said she considers herself fortunate, having found meaningful work all these years.

“I’ve been really blessed,” she said in a phone interview. “The work that I’ve been honored to be a part of has totally matched the core of who I am. I’ve always loved my jobs. I’m really a servant. I like to help people. That’s kind of who I am. I’ve been able to do that.”

Her work at Mt. Ascutney involved bringing community members together, first to identify social needs and then to try to address them. Among her contributions was helping to organize an annual holiday toy drive, regularly carting food donations from the hospital to the food shelf and helping to make sure the annual flu vaccine clinics happened in area schools, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic when health care workers were busy.

“I didn’t personally administer all 999 vaccines,” she said in an email, characteristically downplaying her role in a team effort. “I had help from ... the school nurses. But I organized the clinics and went to all of them, giving more vaccines than I ever had in all the years proceeding! It was a great adventure!”

Melanie Sheehan, who worked with Lord for 20 years and now has taken over the role of community health director at Mt. Ascutney, considers Lord a mentor.

“Jill is very much a woman of faith and Christian values,” Sheehan said. “It truly influenced not only her work (but) I think how she treated people.”

When she met with Lord, Sheehan said, she always felt her mentor was “100% present.”

“There was not a lot of distraction,” Sheehan said. “She would look you in the eye and smile and say, ‘How are you?’ She really meant it. She cared.”

Lord, who earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Vermont, worked as a visiting nurse in Burlington and then in Woodstock before spending 10 years at the White River Junction VA Medical Center. She first arrived at Mt. Ascutney on July 6, 1992, a date she remembers because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was doing an inspection.

“I jumped right in,” she said. “It was great way to be oriented.”

She served for about 24 years as Mt. Ascutney’s director of patient care services and chief nursing officer, before becoming its community health director.

Even before she held that title, however, she and her colleagues saw that the hospital had a role to play in addressing social challenges such as housing, food security, substance misuse and isolation, which are now called the social determinants of health.

She recalled a meeting in the 1990s with then-Mt. Ascutney CEO Richard Slusky, at which they discussed what the hospital’s role ought to be. (Slusky, who died in 2021, led the hospital from 1982 to 2010 and later led health care reform efforts for the state.)

“We should not be an institution that just accepts the ill and the injured,” she said they determined. “We really need to promote health. As a community-based institution we have the ability to do that. We made a plan. I had the go-ahead.”

She started by writing a grant for a school-based clinic in Windsor as a way to reach families.

“I was yahoo, happy, happy,” she said. But then, the initial community response was negative. She recalled people saying they saw it as an attempt to install an abortion clinic in the school. For Lord, who said she is “morally opposed to abortion,” that was devastating.

But then, they held a public meeting to discuss ideas for the types of services the community would like to see in the schools. When they did get the grant, Lord said they were able to put those ideas into action.

That process of surveying the community to ask what it needs, then seeking resources and partners to address those needs was a method Lord and her colleagues followed repeatedly over the years.

“Then you start having relationships (and) understand the infrastructure of the community,” she said. “All you have to do is ask and people step up.”

Sheehan said Lord’s commitment to the community was “contagious.”

It “made you give back to her,” Sheehan said. “To be a part of her mission was a blessing.”

Lord recognized that Windsor was a “gap community,” situated between Hartford and Springfield, Vt., where the state has district offices providing social services, Sheehan said. So she helped create the Windsor Connection Resource Center, which offers space for different agencies, such as Vermont Adult Learning, Senior Solutions, mental health providers and recovery coaches, to provide services.

“Jill created that space with a vision,” Sheehan said.

Hospitals regularly conduct community needs assessments to gather data, and Lord’s connections helped Mt. Ascutney’s community health improvement plan, which stems from the assessment, said Alice Ely, director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley.

“Jill’s history of really working with a big group of community partners ... Made the whole process more complete,” Ely said.

Ely said she looks to what Lord did as a model for how best to engage community members in other discussions.

Dr. Rudy Fedrizzi, the White River Junction public health services district director for the Vermont Department of Health, said that Lord has exhibited a knack for bringing people together.

Fedrizzi credited Lord with seeing beyond the usual public health conversations on topics such as food, housing and transportation to consider spirituality in its “widest sense” as a factor in people’s well-being. It was a “special feature of how Jill imagines health,” he said.

Lord, who is in remission from stage 4 ovarian cancer, faced her diagnosis and treatment “with courage and grace,” Fedrizzi, who sits on a spiritual health working group formerly overseen by Lord, said.

While her response to such a challenge didn’t surprise Fedrizzi, he said it made him wonder: “Can we grow hope for an entire community?”

Looking back over the years, Lord said she doesn’t think the community’s needs have changed much. The top five challenges remain: substance misuse, mental health, food security, isolation for seniors and homelessness.

She chalked that up to “the human condition and the frailties we address” and noted that the necessary response also remains similar: “People helping people; neighbor helping neighbor (and) health care being a strong partner in all of that.”

The food drive in Lord’s honor, organized through a collaboration by the hospital, local food shelves, Building Bright Futures, Volunteers in Action and other community partners, continues through June 30.

Items most needed include: peanut butter; jam/jelly; canned tuna or chicken; microwaveable mac and cheese; and fruit cups. Collection sites include: Windsor Connection Resource Center; the Windsor and Hartland Mascoma Bank branches; and Weathersfield Proctor Library in Ascutney.

Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.