Glenys has been providing care to others almost her entire life. Born in Wales during World War II, she spent most of her childhood years with her grandmother (whose husband returned from the trenches of World War I with what was then referred to as shell shock—the debilitating psychological condition that’s known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). “My grandmother used to take me around to care for people in England and Wales [where hospices, coincidentally, originated],” she recalls, whose father was away in the army at that time, while her mother had to go to work in a parachute factory. “My grandmother didn’t get paid for it. She just did it.”

After meeting and marrying an American and then getting divorced, she immigrated to America in the mid-60s with her three young sons, and worked in Detroit’s first Head Start program. She soon relocated to California—first to Berkeley, where she tried to put her University of Wales teaching degree to use, then to the mountains of Santa Cruz for nine years (where she taught and waitressed), and then to Los Angeles.