FEATURED PROFILE: Allison Kestenbaum, MA, MPA, BCC, ACPE Certified Educator
By Helen McNeal, Senior Advisor to the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab
A key trait that defines chaplains is compassion. Chaplaincy is becoming more deeply integrated into the multiple areas of healthcare, including palliative care, and spreading into other arenas like support for first responders, sports teams and other organizations. With that growth comes the need for additional skillsets for chaplains, such as the ability to work in a team, research competence, and organizational savvy. To find an example of a chaplain that combines compassion, teamwork, research “chops”, and organizational savvy, one need look no farther than Allison Kestenbaum.
Allison is the supervisor of the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program and chaplain for the Doris A. Howell Palliative Care Service at University of California San Diego Health. In this role, she serves as a member of the palliative care team, providing spiritual care to the patients, caregivers and staff at the outpatient Moores Cancer Center and the UC San Diego Health inpatient hospitals. She also serves as a member of the UC San Diego Health Ethics Committee and Healer Education Assessment and Referral Committee. While these are fairly traditional roles for chaplains in a hospital setting, as UC San Diego Health’s first full-time professional chaplain, she has so successfully demonstrated the value of a board-certified, professional chaplain that UC San Diego Health has established a formal, professional chaplaincy department and moved to hire other professional chaplains to support areas beyond palliative care. Another marker of Allison’s success at UC San Diego has been her gathering of organizational support for the establishment of both an in-person and a distance learning CPE program through ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care and Education. Although Allison was already a Certified Pastoral Educator (formerly CPE Supervisor) when she joined UCSD in 2017, it fell to her to nurture the palliative care team’s embryonic interest in having a CPE program, garner the necessary support from UCSD leadership, and make the program a reality.
However, many know Allison not for the work associated directly with her role at UCSD but rather for the way she has championed the importance of chaplaincy in the field of palliative care.
Allison is the first chaplain to be recognized by the Cambia Health Foundation as a Sojourns Scholar. The Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program is designed to identify, cultivate and advance the next generation of palliative care leaders, supporting innovative projects and emerging leaders by investing in their professional development. As a Sojourns Scholar, Allison is developing and implementing a CPE program to educate community clergy about caring for those with serious or advanced illness and palliative care. In addition, Allison has recently co-authored, along with Katy Hyman, MDiv, BCC and Rabbi Edith Meyerson, DMin, BCC the Center to Advance Palliative Care’s toolkit Addressing the Spiritual Care Needs of Patients with Serious Illness. This toolkit is a compilation of resources and guidance for assessing and addressing spiritual and existential needs, as well as leveraging the role of the chaplain on the interdisciplinary team.
Many know Allison for the way she has championed the importance of chaplaincy in the field of palliative care.
One of the most visible gaps in palliative care workforce development has been the absence of a representational group for chaplains. The other members of the palliative care team each have a palliative care-focused entity where they can gather as colleagues and share both research and experience, and which represents them in palliative care policy discussions at the national level. Until this year, this has not been true for chaplains. In March of 2020, Allison and her colleague, Katy Hyman, planned a formal gathering of palliative care chaplains in conjunction with the annual American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine/Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association conference, representing a first step in the direction of having such an entity. While COVID-19 interrupted these plans, nonetheless they were a vital milestone for chaplaincy in palliative care and in healthcare generally.
Allison is also recognized as an advocate and supporter of chaplaincy education and research. She is currently a participant in the Henry Luce Foundation-sponsored project Educating Effective Chaplains, a partnership between Boston University and the Lab, and she is also serving as an Educator and Consultant to Georgetown Medstar Health. As part of this work, she is a consultant to the principal investigator and chaplains in a mixed methods study examining the impact of chaplains and spiritual assessment on advanced lung cancer and ALS patients receiving palliative care. She also developed a manual on the Spiritual Assessment and Intervention Model (AIM) to train the chaplains participating in the study. This consulting is a follow-on to the work that she did at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) with Dr. Laura Dunn in the “Spiritual Assessment and Intervention Model (AIM) in Outpatient Palliative Care for Patients with Advanced Cancer” study. This project, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and HealthCare Chaplaincy, was designed to provide an in-depth picture of what chaplains do in their work with patients.
Allison is also recognized as an advocate and supporter of chaplaincy education and research.
Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Allison was the Director of Programs and ACPE Supervisor at the Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Collaborating with faculty and seminary leadership, she developed pastoral education programs, managed a Certificate Program in Jewish Pastoral Care and Counseling and cultivated vital partnerships with community organizations to provide clinical training sites for CPE students. These partner organizations included hospices, seminaries and religious institutions as well as less traditional partners including human service and disaster relief agencies. An outgrowth of these collaborations was the initiation of research projects about pastoral education and spiritual care, as well as Allison being asked to serve as the project director for a qualitative study of disaster spiritual care CPE. At JTS, Allison also was able to expand on her leadership experiences, further developing the JTS CPE program to include an accredited satellite site at Union Theological Seminary and one at the JTS office in Chicago.
Prior to joining JTS, Allison was responsible for managing the operations of spiritual care services at the UCSF Mount Zion campus. After completing her CPE residency and then supervisory training, she was responsible for coordinating an extended part-time CPE program. She also managed the admissions process for part-time, year-long residency and summer internship CPE programs, and participated in implementing a successful ten-year ACPE accreditation site visit to the UCSF CPE program.
Allison brings together both the skills of a chaplain and the talents of an administrator and leader. When asked where the root of this lies, Allison is quick to point out that she has been fortunate to have had exceptional allies and mentors at all levels. “They have invested in me and in my ideas. And, in turn, I care deeply about those relationships.” In addition, she points back to the unique opportunity provided to her during her post-graduate work at New York University (NYU). At that time, as she was pursuing her Master of Arts in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU launched its Master of Public Administration program and offered the opportunity for a second master’s with a specialization in Non-Profit Management and Jewish Communal Service. It was an opportunity that she acknowledges was foundational. “This gave me the opportunity to look at things in a way that was transdisciplinary, practical and also Judaic. I had classes in finance, grant-writing and review. I learned about boards, oversight and fiduciary responsibilities and how the work of boards trickles down to recipients. I learned not to be afraid of the business side. I think every chaplain should have this experience as part of their education, and that we should be looking at how we can meaningfully build it into the education of current chaplains.”
Allison also points to the importance of an experience before she ever became a chaplain. In her first job after graduating with her bachelor’s degree, she worked as a Planning Associate with the Caring Commission of UJA Federation of New York. In this role she was involved with the first RFP and grant awards for spiritual care in Israel. Her work in administering the grants enabled her to help define Israel’s first spiritual care organization, give it a name and establish training guidelines. “This shaped my desire to be a practitioner. I saw firsthand how spirituality and healthcare were both experiences that everyone shares. Everyone experiences illness and everyone has spiritual needs. Chaplaincy was a way of addressing my interest in spirituality and religion but in a very practical way that could positively impact people’s lives.”
Allison brings together both the skills of a chaplain and the talents of an administrator and leader.
Throughout her career, Allison has dived in with passion not only to her work but also to volunteer boards and responsibilities. Whether it is serving on the Neshama: National Association of Jewish Chaplains Certification Commission or the VA San Diego CPE Professional Advisory Group or the UCSD Health Ethics Committee, Allison believes that these roles are all part of her spiritual commitment to service.
This “duty of service” is also reflected in her view of innovation and its importance. “There is so much need in the patient population. So many needs are not being addressed and while staff are sometimes shocked by the fact that chaplaincy is a profession, they are almost always equally wowed by what professional chaplains bring to patients, staff and the organization. I believe that what professional chaplains have to offer is so often misunderstood by health care providers. There are so many opportunities for us to enhance care, both through our presence and by our skills. It is critical that chaplains bring forward our contributions through our professional education and practice, and demonstrate the value of our contributions not only by everything we do but also through research.”
It is a call to action that is resonating through the field of palliative care and stands to impact both chaplaincy and healthcare.
– – – – – –
Learn more about this article’s author, Helen McNeal, here.
FREE eBook: Spiritual Care Resources for Religious Holidays
This eBook shares innovative ways that chaplains and other spiritual leaders are finding to celebrate together during this pandemic and beyond.
The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, with the expert leadership of Dr. Shelly Rambo and Ylisse Cheney Bess, has pulled together this resource guide with ideas for celebrating the holy days of Easter, Passover and Ramadan even when coming together in person isn’t possible.
It also contains resources and ideas for those who are spiritual but not religious.