Pris Vanbuskirk Needs Your Help

Hi. My name is Katherine Nevius. I'm raising money for a good friend.

This may be a little bit long, but it’s important for all reading this to understand the breadth of the difficulty in which a good friend and classmate from the Madeira School class of 1973/Vassar Class of 1977 finds herself. She's in need, and we can help her.

Pris Vanbuskirk has suffered extraordinary setbacks throughout her life. The old saying “If it weren’t for bad luck, she’d have no luck at all” could have been coined for her.

Born with cerebral palsy, Pris overcame that difficult start. She graduated from Madeira and then Vassar College, completing a master’s degree in Social Work and Law/Social Policy at Bryn Mawr, getting married, and having a daughter… but her world soon began to change for the worse.

She was divorced, had to give custody of her daughter to her ex-husband (it was in the child's best interest), and in 1998 entered a convent, where she remained until 2006. When she emerged, she found that her vocation—clinical social work—had changed dramatically during the protracted absence. Lacking the technological skills to return to the job, Pris ended up working in retail at TJ Maxx, among other similar employment. She was able to buy a house in South Carolina - and was eventually stricken with the first of three bouts of cancer (the most recent of which occurring in 2022).

After Pris came through successful treatment, in 2018, Hurricane Florence destroyed her home, leaving her with nearly nothing. It was her sole investment. In poor health, unable to work, and homeless, Pris found herself having to subsist on her $1,500 per month Social Security alone. Rent cost $1,000 per month, leaving her only $500 monthly on which to live. For the past five or six years, she’s relied mostly on friends who have rooms in their homes or cottages on their properties where she has lived for free or at low cost.

Recently reunited and living with her daughter for several months, Pris took a fall and broke her hip. This required emergency surgery at a hospital near her daughter’s residence. Today Pris is in a rehab facility, where continued bleeding and other problems necessitated a second emergency surgery. She is trying to figure out next steps with housing and insurance. Sadly, her daughter, who also has financial and employment problems, can no longer care for her.

And now she’s facing discharge from the rehab facility. But where to go? She has no home and no family that can help. Had her much older brother told her that her mother had left her an inheritance upon her death, life would have been enormously different. Instead, as executor of the will, he took Pris’s inheritance for himself—leaving her as she is today, in ill-health and destitute.

The combination of events would have knocked most people down for the count. But if you know Pris, you know that she possesses an indomitable spirit. In spite of her dire situation, she’s remained cheerful and optimistic. She believes in the goodness of others and trusts that things will work out. Some of her Madeira classmates have decided that she shouldn’t have to wait for Providence to step in; we want to nudge it along right now.

So this GoFundMe was created. If you can, please donate. And then share this with anyone you know who might care to do the same. Thank you.