When there’s nowhere else to go in the final days, Jerry’s Place offers safe refuge at no cost.

Over the years, oncologist Dr. John Hausdorff and his colleagues at Pacific Cancer Care noticed that some patients needed hospice care but had no viable place to go in their final weeks of life. Maybe the family wasn’t equipped to care for their loved one, maybe no suitable home existed.

“We talked about how nice it would be to have a place for hospice patients who had no place to be,” Hausdorff says. They looked for a location, but they had no money. It sat as “a great idea,” he says, until a few years later when a “little ad hoc unofficial group” got more serious. They hit upon the idea of leasing beds at an existing care center. The Hospice Giving Foundation provided the funds to launch at the end of 2021.

Hausdorff and his colleagues formed a nonprofit to accept the funds and named it after their beloved late colleague, Dr. Jerome “Jerry” Rubin. The Jerry Rubin Foundation for Cancer Care used HGF’s grant to lease two beds at About Care Assisted Living in Seaside, and named it Jerry’s Place.

Hospice organizations come to Jerry’s Place to provide specialized care; the assisted living facility provides day-to-day care. As the only social model hospice in Monterey County – a nonprofit option when dying at home isn’t available, that includes collaboration with hospice services and volunteers – Jerry’s Place charges residents nothing.

The first bed was occupied a few days before Christmas in 2021. Since then they’ve served 25 clients, ranging in age from 53-96. The average length of stay is 42 days. Jerry’s Place has two part-time employees and six volunteers.

HGF awarded Jerry’s Place $200,000 for the first year which covered the beds, each costing $7,500 a month, or $90,000 per bed, but now it’s up to the Jerry Rubin Foundation to find funds. They recently got a jumpstart with a $50,000 donation from Barbara Collins, a former oncology patient of Dr. Rubin’s, and her husband Joe.

The nonprofit’s “Big Idea” for Monterey County Gives! is to raise money to lease more beds, hopefully up to six. “If we get more beds, there will be more patients,” Hausdorff says. “Like most things, if you build it, they will come.”