The Unsung Key to Positive Aging: Skillful Living with Hearing Loss
Addressing hearing health is critical for living well, yet hearing loss in older adults is often dismissed as simply a “normal” part of aging. Its full emotional impact is difficult to understand, even for those who regularly work with clients who have hearing loss. Delivered with the compassion, humor, and expertise that comes from lived experience, this session illuminates the important relationship between communication and well-being and provides skill-based strategies to help people with hearing loss live vibrant, communication-rich lives. The audience will leave the session with increased empathy and a list of actionable steps to help support their clients who live with this invisible disability.

Biography
Shari Eberts is a passionate hearing health advocate, author, and speaker on hearing loss issues. She is the founder of LivingWithHearingLoss.com, a popular blog and online community for people with hearing loss, and an executive producer of We Hear You, an award-winning documentary about the hearing loss experience. Shari has an adult-onset genetic hearing loss and hopes that by sharing her story, she will help others to live more peacefully with their own hearing issues. Her book “Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss” (co-authored with Gael Hannan) is the ultimate survival guide for living with hearing loss. Shari holds a BS in Psychology from Duke University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

The Unsung Key to Positive Aging: Skillful Living with Hearing Loss
Addressing hearing health is critical for living well, yet hearing loss in older adults is often dismissed as simply a “normal” part of aging. Its full emotional impact is difficult to understand, even for those who regularly work with clients who have hearing loss. Delivered with the compassion, humor, and expertise that comes from lived experience, this session illuminates the important relationship between communication and well-being and provides skill-based strategies to help people with hearing loss live vibrant, communication-rich lives. The audience will leave the session with increased empathy and a list of actionable steps to help support their clients who live with this invisible disability.

Biography
Gael Hannan is a hearing health advocate, writer, and speaker/performer who lives with profound hearing loss. She creates award-winning awareness projects that help people live more successfully with their hearing challenges, including the acclaimed one-woman show “Unheard Voices,” a humorous memoir “The Way I Hear It: A Life with Hearing Loss” and a regular blog for HearingHealthMatters.org that has a passionate international following. Gael has profound hearing loss and is bimodal, using both a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. “Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss” (co-authored with Shari Eberts) is the supportive how-to guide she wishes she’d had at the start of her hearing loss journey.

Public Health Palliative Care: Supporting Each Other through Advanced Illness, Death and Grief
One of the main commonalities we all share is that each of us, and everyone we meet, will experience illness, death and grief at some point in our lives. Public Health Palliative Care states that these experiences are everyone’s responsibility- we all have a role to play in showing up for one another during difficult times. In fact, 90% of a person’s bereavement support needs have been shown to best be met by friends, family and community-based supports.

The Peaceful Presence Project in Bend is cultivating this Public Health Palliative Care Model by building an Oregon Network for Community-Based Serious Illness Support. In this session, learn the role of community members in navigating the journey through serious illness, dying and grief and how we can each show up with Compassion for our neighbors, family, friends and coworkers.

Biography
Erin is a Certified Hospice and Palliative Care Nurse with 17 years of experience in hospice, palliative care and oncology. She co-founded and co-directs a community-based organization in Bend, Oregon.

Erin is a board member for the Oregon Hospice and Palliative Care Association and an Oregon state ambassador for the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association. She is a 2022 Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar with a project to develop continuing education in palliative care for community health workers. After seeing that many patients came to hospice afraid of death and largely unprepared for it, she committed to educating the community at all levels to prepare for and talk about serious and terminal illness with compassion and tenderness. She empowers families to be present with their loved ones and believes that by talking about and planning for serious illness and death, we can ease much of the suffering that arises at the end of life.

Erin is a graduate of the Being with Dying and GRACE programs at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico and a practitioner of Bedside Yoga for end-of-life care.

LGBTQIA2S+ Older Adults, Understanding and Responding to Their Challenges
It is estimated there are approximately 2.7 million LGBTQIA2S+ adults aged 50 and older in the United States, 1.1 million of whom are 65 and older. “LGBTQIA2S+ Older Adults, Understanding and Responding to Their Challenges” provides a view of who they are and where they live and an overview of their unique needs and experiences so that service providers, advocates, and policymakers can consider these factors to reach and meet the needs of these populations.
Session Agenda:

1. Who are LGBTQIA2S+ older adult populations, identities and issues
2. Key challenges and disparities faced by LGBTQIA2S+ older adults
3. Regulatory related requirements
4. Creating a welcoming environment for LGBTQIA2S+  older adults
5. LGBTQIA2S+ older adult resources

Biography
Liz James serves as Chair of the Oregon LGBTQ+ Aging Coalition (Coalition), Commissioner on the LGBTQIA2s+ Subcommittee of Governors Commission on Senior Services, Member of the RVCOG SDS Senior Advisory Council, and Volunteer Leader with AARP Oregon. She represented the Coalition in the development and 2023 passage of the Oregon Bill of Rights in long-term and community-based care for LGBTQIA2S+ residents and residents living with HIV, provided content expertise for the 2022 Age+ briefing paper, “Seen, Heard and Here – Older LGBTQ+ Oregonians“, was a Member of the 2020 Oregon LGBTQ+ 55+ Older Adult Survey Advisory Committee, and Co-chair and presenter for the 2019 Southern Oregon LGBTQ+ Health and Wellness Summit. As CEO of the Lesbian Health Initiative, a Houston-based LGBTQ+ health nonprofit, she developed and delivered LGBTQ+ Cultural Competency 101 Tools to Improve Patient Communication, Care and Outcomes, a multi-discipline CEU training course for healthcare professionals, researchers, and students. Before LHI, Liz enjoyed a many-year career as a high-tech sector business development executive.

Reviving Faith Community Nursing in Rural Oregon
This session will chronicle the bumpy and oft surprising journey of a small group of passionate faith community nurses (FCNs) and health ministers as they embarked on interprofessional collaboration with local community-based organizations to rekindle engagement in faith community nursing and health ministry in rural East Linn County, OR. Attendees will hear how these local collaborations soon capture the attention of the Oregon Health Authority, the Oregon State Board of Nursing, local health system leaders, and Medicaid providers, resulting in high-level interest in faith community nursing and health ministry and how they are leveraging this increased visibility to gain acceptance of this important practice within faith communities in their own backyard.

Biography
Deb is President and Executive Director of the Faith Community Health Network, a non-profit organization located in Lebanon, OR with a statewide – and, at times, national – reach. She has been a faith community nurse since 2017 and founded and has led the Faith Community Health Network since its inception as a coalition in January of 2019. She has an active nursing practice in her faith community, Am HaSefer – People of the Book, in addition to service with the Faith Community Health Network.

Deb has been known nationally for her expertise in workplace safety, health, and wellness and served in the National Guard in South Dakota and Oregon for a total of 27 years, retiring as an Army Nurse Corps Lieutenant Colonel in 2003. She earned her Practical Nursing Certificate from Western Dakota Vocational Technical Institute, her Associate Degree in Nursing from Dakota Wesleyan University, her Baccalaureate Degree in Nursing from South Dakota State University, and her Master’s Degree in Public Health from Oregon State University.

Biography
Kiersten is a certified Community Health Worker and volunteers as the voice of affiliated Health Ministers in her Faith Community Health Network Board position. She is employed full-time with Crossroads Communities in Lebanon, OR as the veterans’ liaison and client services advocate. She is actively involved as a Health Minister with Am HaSefer Oregon – People of the Book in Lebanon, OR. She is a native Oregonian.

Kiersten served as an Orthopedic Trauma Medic in the Army for six years and was part of establishing an orthopedic practice at Emanuel Hospital in northeast Portland after discharge. Kiersten trained and became licensed as a massage therapist while in this role, and these skills, along with empathy gained through life experience, brought a holistic aspect to the practice and equipped her to assist when conventional therapies did not produce the desired outcome.

She completed the Foundations of Faith Community Nursing/Health Ministry Course through the Faith Community Health Network and her Community Health Worker certification through Oregon State University.

Biography
Marcy is the Ethics Officer and an active Faith Community Health Network Board Member, assisting in all aspects of leadership, including grant writing and public speaking. She is a full-time faculty member in the Linn-Benton Community College nursing program and has worked extensively with students in the clinical settings and in the classroom to push them to think beyond the obvious and be ready to analyze and identify problems early to improve patient outcomes. As clinical coordinator, Marcy’s primary responsibilities include ensuring clinical placements for students, supporting clinical instruction, and developing alternate avenues for engaging nursing practice with students, especially within community-based settings. Marcy is building a faith community nursing practice at New Hope Church in Lebanon, OR.

Marcy earned her BSN from Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, her Master of Science in Health Education from Western Oregon University, and Master of Science in Nursing Western Governors University. She completed the Foundations of Faith Community Nursing/Health Ministry Course through the Faith Community Health Network.