Caring for our caregivers: Helping Rose regain her footing.

Caring for our caregivers: helping Rose regain her footing.

Please join us in helping Rose Schultz (Stokely), a volunteer with the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, who broke her ankle when she fell off the Orcas Center stage while decorating for the festival in August. Injured and unable to work as an elder caregiver, she depleted her savings and was notified of eviction from her lodgings due to her income insecurity. We can’t let those who generously volunteer for our Island’s premier events drop through a crack — and Orcas needs its caregivers like Rose. She is mending, but slowly. Learn more about Rose and the matter at hand below, but please, help one of our own now!

About this campaign

While working for the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival as a volunteer this past summer, Rose Schultz (Stokely), an Orcas eldercare and end-of-life care professional who has since 2022 designed and arranged breathtaking floral sculptures for the Festival, fell from the stage and broke her ankle. This left her in a boot and crutches and unable to safely perform the physically demanding work of elder care, and thus without any source of income since August. (In November, she was able to return to eldercare, though with an unfortunately lightened load).

This campaign by friends of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and Orcas Center, seeks to raise a minimum of $20,000 to recoup as much as possible of the wages Rose has lost during her recovery, which is ongoing. While both the OC and OICMF have full insurance to cover medical bills for their volunteers, Rose's need is well beyond that at this point.

Your contribution will be used directly for living costs through her continued rehabilitation, including, but not limited to: relocation and new housing costs, necessary repairs to her only vehicle, specialist healthcare, and other ongoing essential life needs resulting from this incident and injury.

About Rose

An island artist, volunteer, dedicated eldercare provider, and cherished friend to many, Rose has brought beauty and ease to Orcas in her five years making the island her home. Rose is a lover of music, community, and the arts, and has volunteered for the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival with joyful devotion since it reopened post-Covid in 2022, co-leading and organizing volunteers to craft the floral design team’s astonishing botanical art installations.

Devoted to a life of service and to providing loving care for our island’s respected seniors, Rose has spent the last 20 years as a community health and healing practitioner. She arrived on Orcas in early 2020, called to the island to care for seniors and to companion advanced elders and their families through the end-of-life journey. The last five years have found her providing palliative and hospice care while nourishing her soul with photography, painting, poetry, and floral design – work that is deeply rooted in her connection to our majestic cedar groves and lustrous blue-grey waters.

The Nitty Gritty

On the Festival’s final day in August, Rose was tending to the spectacular floral arrangements onstage at the Orcas Center, and fell from the stage and broke her ankle. The fracture taxed an earlier injury complicating her recovery, and Rose was left unable to bear weight on her left foot for nearly three months, making it impossible and unsafe to do her important work providing care for our seniors with her own mobility limited by a cast boot and crutches.

Now, four months into her ongoing recovery, Rose is (thankfully!) walking and working again, but her capacity to fully and safely return to the physically demanding work and responsibilities of elder care remains limited. After covering her living costs and ongoing essential needs without a source of income for three months, her hard-earned financial cushion was depleted, and as a result, she is now being forced to vacate her Orcas home of 5 years by the end of January.

Our humble request

Again, this campaign seeks to raise a minimum of $20,000 to help an injured Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival volunteer to recoup some of the wages she lost during her initial recovery, and pay off debts she incurred as the result of being unable to work her physically demanding job of caring for our seniors. There is, unfortunately, little other recourse for volunteers who are injured in the course of their work.

We ask you, and all friends of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and the Orcas Center to please contribute, and to call on any others who may have delighted in Rose’s hard work (with her fellow volunteers) on the astonishing floral arrangements onstage at the Festival over the years, to come together with us to raise support beyond this modest goal, so as to more accurately meet Rose’s true need.

Likewise, we ask any who have had the opportunity to work with or volunteer with, and to dance, dream, and be blessed alongside Rose since she arrived on our beautiful island to please consider a contribution. Funds will be used directly for costs of living through Rose’s continued rehabilitation, including, but not limited to: relocation and new housing costs, car repair, specialist healthcare, and other ongoing essentials resulting from her unfortunate injury.

Please share the word!

Gratitude for our Orcas Island family

This time of year finds us reflecting on our blessings, cherishing time with our loved ones, and in the case of this close and generous community, lifting one another up.

Orcas Island has become Rose’s chosen family. Those of us who have had the opportunity to walk beside her have been deeply touched by her generous presence and kind, compassionate heart. She has shown up time and again for her elder clients, friends, fellow care providers, artists, and our Orcas island community members. Despite being most at ease in the role of caregiver, provider, helper, and volunteer, this moment finds Rose in need – and also with an opportunity: to receive a mirror of the love and devotion she has offered to so many of us.

Just as artists are called to make beauty from ashes, as an island family, we often face an opportunity to rise up and meet a healing crisis. In this moment, we are called as a community to support Rose as she regains her footing, and in so doing, we practice and remember what it is to be a village, a place of love, devotion, and belonging for all who call it home.