2026 HCS Annual Meeting

5:00pm- Refreshments from CC&D’s Kitchen
5:30 PM – Program, including highlights from HCS, the Hallowell Singers, and a featured presentation from author J. Peter Cobb.

J. Peter Cobb Presents “When Home Becomes the Care Center: Complexity, Compassion, and Hope”
J. Peter Cobb is the author of To Alice (Touchpoint Press, 2022), a novel exploring boundary issues faced by hospice and home care workers, and Some Things Aren’t Meant to Be (2024). In 2016, he retired after a long career as director of the VNAs of Vermont, the trade association representing Vermont’s Visiting Nurse Associations. Over the years he has also worked as a reporter, grant writer, lobbyist, and mental health worker. Today, Cobb is a correspondent for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and the Rutland Herald, a volunteer driver for the Vermont Association for the Blind and Disabled, and a volunteer teacher for Vermont Adult Basic Education. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Vermont and a Master’s in Special Education from Johnson State College (now Vermont State University). He lives in Barre, Vermont, with his wife Cindy, and has two daughters and seven grandchildren.

The Hallowell Singers: In a small house on a back road in southern Vermont, a woman is dying at home surrounded by her loving family. It is a winter evening in 2003, a few days before Dinah’s last, a group of friends from the community and her church, gather around her bed to sing. She joins in. She mouths the words when her voice fails her. She smiles and her eyes shine. As we sing around her, Dinah is held up by her loving husband Fred, a daughter on either side of her. We are held in deep respect and awe for being invited to share in Dinah’s dying process, to witness this kind of love, to stand so close to death and feel beauty and peace as we anoint her with song and are filled with grace in return. This was the true beginning of Hallowell. The details don’t matter. We formed after two visits to Dinah Breunig’s bedside in her home, her family welcoming and present, during the final days of her life on earth. Since our inception in 2003, we have served hundreds of families in our community. We have also helped to launch a still growing number of hospice choirs throughout the New England region and across the country by teaching workshops, offering guidance and counsel and being available for continued support for developing hospice choirs. We are honored to be a strong model for the growing movement of the practice of bedside singing for the dying.

Sponsored by The Richard’s Group and Edward Jones