To Jill Lord, caring for people’s health meant making sure they had access to healthy food, addiction treatment services, mental health care, child care, housing and transportation.

In 1999, it meant attending a Windsor Selectboard meeting with a group of teenagers to advocate for turning two abandoned tennis courts into a skate park a week after town officials banned skateboarding downtown. In 2022, it meant supporting Windsor Selectboard member Tera Howard’s plan for an Overdose Awareness Day event where community members could also access treatment resources.

“I use the definition that if it has an effect on one person, it’s effective,” Lord said in an interview with the Valley News in August 2022. “If you affect one person, you affect a family unit.”

Lord, who died of cancer Aug. 17 at age 71 at her home in Cornish, held many roles in her 40-plus years in health care, the majority of which were spent at Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Care Center in Windsor, including top roles of chief nursing officer and director of community health.

“Her focus was on really understanding that much of what makes up the health of a person happens outside of the walls of a health system,” said Melanie Sheehan, who worked with Lord at Mt. Ascutney for more than 20 years.

That focus informed her approach to community programs.

In the late 2010s, the Rev. Paul Voltmer, pastor at Trinity Evangelical Church in Windsor, worked with Lord to drive people who were experiencing homeless in Windsor to a shelter in Springfield, Vt., for the night and bring them back the next day to spend time in their community.

“Part of me was like is it really worth the effort? It was really just a handful of people who were being served,” Voltmer recalled. “I often felt like Jill never counted the numbers. One was enough. One life being changed was enough.”

Lord was instrumental in launching what was then known as the Windsor Connection Community Resource Center (now the Windsor Resource Center), which opened in the early 2000s to provide a place where people could access social services in Windsor, instead of having to travel to Springfield, Vt., or Hartford. She hosted regular meetings of social service providers so they could discuss gaps in the system and ways to fill them.

“If you called her and asked her for something, she’d say, ‘I’m at your service,’” said Lord’s former coworker Carla Kamel. “If you had an idea, she would sit down and listen and say, ‘We’ll make this happen.’ ”

Lord was working as a supervisor at Mt. Ascutney when a colleague told her a family receiving pediatric care needed mattresses. A few days later, she’d arranged for mattresses to be delivered to the family’s home.

“That was her: ‘We’re not going to (have) these children wait another weekend without a bed’,” said Kamel, a Springfield, Vt., resident who is now community care coordinator at the Thompson Center.

Though her view of how to care for people’s health was expansive, her identity as a health care provider was important to her.

Even as she climbed the ranks at Mt. Ascutney, she stayed deeply connected to the hands-on work of being a nurse. If her staff got overwhelmed, she put on scrubs and joined them. Once her husband, Lary Lord, whom she married in 1989, described Lord’s position at the hospital to a friend as chief nursing officer.

“And I said, ‘She used to be a nurse,’ and she said, ‘I’m still a nurse,’ ” Lary Lord recalled. “She was very proud of being a nurse.”

Lord had the ability to operate on two separate planes: She advocated for state policy changes and approaches while never losing sight of the individuals she helped.

“She was giving gas cards to people in recovery so they could get to meetings,” Lord’s son, Jacob Goulet, of Orford, said in an interview with his brothers Jeremiah, of Plainfield, and Justin, of Keene, N.H.

While she was steadfast in her beliefs, she was always open to changing her mind. At first, she was opposed to prescribing medication to treat people coping with substance misuse. When her son, Justin, decided to pursue medication-assisted treatment, Lord initially tried to talk him out of it.

“And probably five years ago … she said to me, ‘I was wrong to tell you not to take that medication because I can see that your life is in a positive position,’ ” Justin Goulet said. “In her helping me and learning about that, she then got involved in chemical dependency work with her job. So I don’t think she so much pulled us to being involved in her work. I think she made her work reflect her love of us in a lot of ways.”

She worked to shift the culture at Mt. Ascutney surrounding people seeking help for addiction at the emergency room because they “are worthwhile and worth treatment,” Sheehan said. She advocated to establish a rapid access to medication assisted treatment program at the ER so that patients could start their recovery journey earlier.

If an organization wasn’t open to having boxes that provide naloxone, the drug overdose reversal medication, at no cost available at their site, for example, she didn’t become discouraged.

“She would just go find where the ‘yes’ was,” Sheehan said.

Part of the way she got to the “yes” was by listening to people from all walks of life and translating those discussions to people who held the purse strings or made policy decisions.

“She was a voice that people in those leadership positions would turn to and ask what she thought,” Sheehan said. “She was able to represent the rural community and their needs.”

Sometimes learning about those needs started with simply listening to someone describe their challenges. Lord understood that telling someone when a food pantry was open wasn’t enough, especially when they were overwhelmed with other concerns.

“She always believed, as I do, is you don’t hand out a brochure,” Kamel said. “You sit with a person, talk it out and ask if they want to make a phone call together.”

Her work was driven by a deep commitment to her Catholic faith and serving God.

“At the base of the faith is a respect for life and human dignity: Every human being is created in the image of God and deserves respect and love,” said Sheehan, who is now executive director of the Vermont Catholic Foundation. “She viewed her life as a blessing, but also a source of blessing for others.”

Lord was a parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi in Windsor. Her strong belief in God helped her cope with the demands of her job and the dozens of roles she held in the community throughout her life, Sheehan said. She worked hard to help people and then surrendered the outcome to God.

“I think everyone knew her faith in Christ was part of who she was and it couldn’t be separated,” Voltmer said. “She didn’t preach it at you, she just lived it.”

Even if various family members and friends did not share her same level of faith, they picked up on the lessons she taught them that were inspired by it.

“I have no doubt that I definitely have less of a narrow mind and more of an open mind about people and the struggles they go through on a daily basis because of her,” Jacob Goulet said.

She relished her role of being a mother to her three sons and daughter, her four stepchildren and a grandmother to her 12 grandchildren. Even though she often worked more than 40 hours a week, she made it a point to watch her sons’ high school games, even if she was late. She enjoyed walking in the ocean on family trips to York Beach in Maine.

“She would show her love through Christmas by making gifts,” Jeremiah Goulet said. “She would start on her cards right after Christmas for the next year.”

In early December, Voltmer received a Christmas card and handmade ornament in the mail in Lord’s handwriting. It was one of 172 cards she’d asked her husband to mail after her death.

“I was blessed by Jill Lord one last time for 2024,” Voltmer said. “That was precious.”

Lord’s family and friends started the Jill Mary Lord Memorial Donor-Advised Fund with the Vermont Catholic Community Foundation to support nonprofit organizations that were important to her, including Turning Point Recovery Center, the food pantry at Trinity Evangelical Church and community programs at Mt. Ascutney. For more information, visit vtcatholicfoundation.org or email Sheehan at melanie@vtcatholicfoundation.org.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.

CORRECTION: Carla Kamel is the community care coordinator at the Thompson Center in Woodstock. A previous version  of this story included an incorrect employer for Kamel.