A LITTLE MORE LIKE HOME—Marla Keesee of Newbury Park paints the hallway at Our Community House of Hope’s future site last month. The nonprofit is leasing a private home in Thousand Oaks to open a hospice for the poor. IRIS SMOOT/Acorn Newspapers What happens to the terminally ill person without a home or family? Teresa Wolf, a registered nurse who’s spent 11 years giving hospice care, knows the most likely answer.

“They get placed in some crummy nursing home . . . and it’s pretty sad,” said Wolf, a Thousand Oaks resident. “And they don’t get very good care, either. But that’s the only alternative if you end up in those situations. . . . We have absolutely no place for them to go, and most people do not want to be in a hospital at the end of life.”

Wolf, 60, and her friend, Ruth Klein, 58, have taken on the challenge of opening the first free residential care home for terminally ill indigent patients in Ventura County.

LENDING A HAND—Volunteers Ellen Henahan, left, Kathy Schwaiger, Jim Henahan, Martha Progulske and Pat Henahan put together office furniture on Aug. 6 as they convert the garage of a private home in Thousand Oaks into a front office for Our Community House of Hope hospice. IRIS SMOOT/Acorn Newspapers They’re calling it Our Community House of Hope.

“We could see the severe need,” said Klein, who was a nurse in her native home of Denmark, where healthcare and in-home hospice care is free. “It was really kind of surprising to see how people scramble here . . . when they have to deal with end of life. Everything is provided for over there.”

After several years of fundraising and enlisting the help of colleagues in the medical field and hospice community, the women started the nonprofit Our Community House of Hope in 2007.

In late October, they plan to open a four-bedroom home in Thousand Oaks where patients during the final weeks of their life with nowhere to go and no money can receive free medical care and emotional support.

Wolf said compassionate action is essential, because every person deserves to be treated with dignity at the end of their life.

“If you’ve ever been included in the end of someone’s life that you love, then you can imagine that person dying alone,” she said. “Our healthcare system is broken, and there’s nobody in the state or federal government that’s even looking at this.”

What’s out there?

Ventura and northern L.A. counties, home to the population Our Community House of Hope will serve, have numerous boardand care homes that will care for the terminally ill but charge up to $6,000 a month. A hospital stay in the intensive care unit can cost up to $4,000 a day.

For people 65 and older, Medicare will pay for medication and for a hospice nurse to visit a dying patient twice a week or so. Private health insurance does the same. But neither insurance will pay for round-the-clock caregivers or a place to live for a homeless terminally ill patient, someone who is often on heavy medication and unable to care for themselves.

MediCal, the state insurance for low-income residents, will pay for a nursing home for the indigent hospice patient, but nursing facilities reserve a limited number of beds for those patients, Wolf said.

It will cost about $300 a day per patient to operate House of Hope, Wolf said, money that will come from fundraising, donations and grants.

Wolf said she discovered a few years ago what might be the state’s only residential hospice home that doesn’t charge for its services, Sarah House in Santa Barbara. The house is warm and inviting—not at all like a nursing facility—and the staff is compassionate and engaging, Wolf said.

A friend of hers praised the care she received there.

“She told me before she died, ‘You know, Teresa, I never found peace or angels or God until I came here,’” Wolf said. “And that’s what I want to replicate . . . because everybody deserves that.”

How they will do it

Before taking on the venture, Wolf and Klein did their homework. Wolf said one in three California seniors live alone and 20 percent live below the poverty line.

The nurses surveyed hospitals in Ventura County and north Los Angeles County and found that on average 50 patients a month leave with nowhere to turn in the final few weeks of their life.

The women visited a hospice home in Tulsa, Okla., to learn how to make House of Hope financially self-sustaining.

“If they can do it in Tulsa, I think we can do it here,” Wolf said. “I just have that faith.”

House of Hope will have six or seven paid staff members working around the clock. Wolf is donating her services as executive director for the first six months of opera- tion. Klein will be the house manager, overseeing the nursing aides.

Wolf said she and Klein are committed to keeping administrative costs low but they plan to pay the staff slightly more than they could earn elsewhere to encourage experienced nursing aides to come on board and stay. The home will also rely on volunteers to help; they will be asked, for example, to befriend a patient, offering them emotional support.

“We want them to feel really loved,” Wolf said of the residents. To encourage community support, Wolf and Klein have spoken to service groups and members of the faith community. City leaders and corporate sponsors will be invited to a weeklong open house planned for later this month.

“When people see a real house and they see the real stories— we’re going to have story boards . . . of people that need this kind of home—then they start donating and investing their time and resources for that,” Wolf said.

Support is building. People have donated furniture. Volunteers joined in a painting party recently to spruce up the house. Moorpark College and Cal State Channel Islands have held fundraising events for the nonprofit, and their students have donated design plans for a 10-patient hospice home the nonprofit hopes to build one day, Wolf said.

In addition, Wolf and Klein are building partnerships with other nonprofits that serve a similar population, such as Habitat for Humanity and Many Mansions.

“We hope to involve them as we get property to build,” Wolf said.

The community should take notice, she said. The U.S. population is growing older—within the next five years, baby boomers 55 and older are expected to outnumber children, Wolf said.

Besides, an unexpected catastrophe could happen to anybody.

“You can plan really well and then suddenly your spouse dies and you get ill and things fall apart in a real quick fashion,” Wolf said. “You might have a house over your head, but you don’t have anybody to take care of you, and you don’t have enough money to pay $4,000 a month. That could happen to almost anyone.”

Despite the bleak circumstances of residents who will live at Our Community House of Hope, the mood there will be upbeat and nurturing, Wolf said.

“It’s not about dying—it’s about living every single day,” she said.