Jennifer McCord says her return to Lori’s Hands almost feels like a homecoming.
McCord (pictured on right) was one of the first volunteers with Lori’s Hands. It was in the apartment she shared with co-founders Sarah LaFave (second from right) and Liz Bonomo (second from left), as well as founding volunteers Carys Golesworthy and Jenny Austin, that the idea for this intergenerational service learning organization first blossomed.
Now she’s the creator and producer of an upcoming podcast about Lori’s Hands clients. The series will debut May 14th, and it spotlights not just clients but the way their surroundings and lives color their experiences.
For McCord, now an audio producer with an interest in telling place-based stories, the return has allowed her to use her professional skills to spotlight Lori’s Hands and also to engage students – particularly students not pursuing a career in healthcare – to use their strengths in a way that contributes to the organization and its goals. “It’s so fun to be able to contribute to Lori’s Hands in a way that feels like it’s in my wheelhouse,” McCord says.
Read on to learn more about the podcast project and a little-known fact about McCord’s connection to the Lori’s Hands logo.
Q. What is your connection with Lori’s Hands?
JM: I was good friends and roommates with Sarah [LaFave] in college. Before Lori’s Hands was even a club, it was an idea — the first cohort of volunteers was basically a bunch of our friends and classmates who agreed that spending an afternoon raking leaves or cleaning someone’s house sounded like fun.
As the club developed and gained traction at Delaware, it makes sense that it drew a lot of volunteers who were the nursing students or bio majors. But I was an apparel merchandising major, and it was really valuable for me too. I think showing up to my client’s home every week enriched my experience in really important ways even though I wasn’t considering a career in health. And looking back, it also gave me a way to understand the implications of the conversations about health and healthcare that we are continuing to have as a nation.
Q. Where did the idea for the podcast come from?
JM: The podcast came from where so many really good ideas for Lori’s Hands come — from Sarah LaFave. We were catching up on a phone call, and I was sharing some of the ways that I was thinking about my hometown, where I’m living right now in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was trying to learn more about local history so I would have better context for the audio stories I was thinking about making.
Sarah called me back maybe a week later and very naturally, cleverly, perfectly connected our conversation to some conversations she had been having lately with an older adult. She basically said something to the effect of, ‘I’ve been talking with this person about what she remembers about the way these neighborhoods used to be, and our conversations have just become magical.’
It occurred to her just what a treasure trove of memories and historical knowledge so many Lori’s Hands clients are, and how many more people would probably appreciate hearing all of these stories.
At that time, Lori’s Hands was already adapting to provide companionship and volunteer services remotely due to the pandemic, so it was just a matter of figuring out how we would conduct interviews and gather good recordings remotely.
Q. Tell us about the podcast. What can we expect?
JM: For the first season, we’re dropping into Newark, Delaware, through the lens of four Lori’s Hands clients from the Delaware chapter. There are five episodes in this season — one intro episode and then one focused on each client.
I love that by capturing these client histories and recollections in audio, listeners can get a much better sense of what it’s like to be around these people — you know, the lovely, and often funny, dynamic ways that these clients show up in conversations. I feel like these episodes are also a way to give people a little window into how special those student-client interactions are and how much value Lori’s Hands clients offer their student volunteers — and for me, that’s the heart of what Lori’s Hands is.
And then beyond that, it’s a vehicle for us to talk about place and health. Lori’s Hands often changes people’s relationship to place — a lot of student volunteers say it helps them get outside their college bubble, or it certainly did for me. And grounding the series in a location lets us shift the way we talk about health away from the individual and more towards their context.
There’s a clip in the intro episode where Maggie Ratnayake explains this beautifully. She says that health is about more than a diagnosis — it’s about the communities we live in, it’s about these structural factors outside of us, it’s about the resources we have at hand, our support systems. So there are moments in this series when we talk about health, but it’s always at that community health level.
Q. How are students involved in the podcast?
JM: As with everything Lori’s Hands does, this series would not have happened without students! Two student interns from University of Maryland Baltimore County essentially created the project with me over the course of the Fall 2020 semester, and a few other student volunteers from the University of Delaware helped with logistics and interviews as well.
Alley and Emily in particular, the interns from UMBC, were a huge part of laying the groundwork for our process. They drafted the model that we used to gain client consent for this project. You know, we’re working with a vulnerable population, and even though these clients know and love Lori’s Hands, we wanted to be really clear that this project was something separate and by no means obligatory.
Students are also the ones leading most of the interviews. They did research beforehand on Delaware and about who these clients are, they prepared questions, they asked new questions in the moment when the conversations went in a different direction — they really took the lead on these interviews. After the interviews were complete, I scripted narration to tie everything together, but the stories that you hear in the episodes are largely a result of the rapport that these students built with their client subjects.
Looking ahead to the next season, which will focus on clients who live in Baltimore, one thing that’s cool for me is that we made an effort to include students who are not necessarily studying something in the health sciences, and who might connect to the project in other ways. We reached out to communications students and students interested in writing. I think of these as people who might not have otherwise found their way to Lori’s Hands.
Q. What is it like to come back and help?
JM: It feels so nice to be able to help in a way that makes sense for what my strengths are — it’s this nice evolution of my relationship with Lori’s Hands but also sort of a homecoming in some ways. This also feels like a very Lori’s Hands thing, showcasing people’s particular strengths in ways that let them shine.
Q. OK, before we let you go, what’s something that people might not know about your connection with Lori’s Hands?
JM: I always forget that I designed the logo.
When Sarah was first turning Lori’s Hands into a real student club, I remember sketching different versions of it on printer paper in our apartment, and then we brought them to the first official Lori’s Hands meeting for people to vote on. And it’s still the same logo that we chose back then.
I always forget that I had anything to do with it because it feels like, oh, that’s just always what it was supposed to be. I do remember at the time feeling relieved that people liked it and that it worked.
There’s a way in which this project feels just like that — that I can contribute in a way that makes sense for me and that also adds value for Lori’s Hands.
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To listen to the Lori’s Hands Community Voices podcast project, visit the podcast home.
