Last week, a star-studded lineup featuring Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Rolling Stones, Alicea Keys, Paul McCartney and other rock royalty took the stage at Madison Square Garden to pay tribute to the heroes of Hurricane Sandy and raise money for ongoing relief efforts.

Here at the John A. Hartford Foundation, we’d like to salute a couple of our heroes of Hurricane Sandy: Ilaina Edison, a Practice Change Fellow, and Eileen Sullivan-Marx, the former director of our Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Edison, RN, MBA, was a mid-level manager at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York when she became a Hartford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies-supported Practice Change Fellow. Through the fellowship, Ilaina was promoted to Vice President of Operations in Specialized Services. Today, she is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York’s operations, including Rehabilitation, Infusion, Mental Health, and the Physician Home Visiting Program.

When Sandy made its direct hit on New York City in late October, Ilaina was responsible for 18,000 lives. She knew that time was critical. Older adults accounted for most deaths in past hurricanes. And most of them died in the days following the storm, as homebound seniors lost power, food, water, and communications.

So Ilaina reached out to another Hartford grantee, New York University’s School of Nursing, home of the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing. Eileen Sullivan-Marx, the new dean, committed her faculty and students to extend the reach of the Visiting Nurse Service. Within days—together—they reached all but 50 home care patients out of the 18,000.

But Ilaina didn’t stop there. She extended the volunteer program to other local nursing schools and—under her leadership—they went door-to-door in the hardest hit regions of the city, such as Far Rockaway and Staten Island to determine if there were others in desperate need of help.

Iliana demonstrates the direct impact of the Practice Change Fellows program, a program approved for continued funding at our September board meeting, now called the Practice Change Leaders program. The Hartford Foundation thanks Ilaina and Eileen for their life-saving efforts following Hurricane Sandy.