Coda empowers easier, early end-of-life conversations, enabling you to Take Responsibility, Choose Your Own Way, and Embrace Life
We know how tough end-of-life discussions can be, so we use every means possible to help you comfortably and more easily start your conversation. Backed by research, Coda partners with families, health and religious professionals, communities, hospitals, universities, hospices, elder care facilities and global partner organizations to make end-of-life conversations a natural part of life.
Empowering you to choose your own way – in life and at the end-of-life.
Helping you take responsibility to make your own decisions regarding what you want before the unexpected, or the anticipated, end might happen.
Allowing you to embrace life by living the life you want. And, giving you peace-of-mind by enabling you to make your own decisions about how you want to die when the time comes.
- Understanding the dire need for end-of-life conversations, major medical centers have begun to provide classes to help their teams hold conversations with patients.
- Medicare and other health insurance companies now pay physicians to start end-of-life discussions with their patients.
- Family and senior centers offer classes to help families deal with the issues and fiduciaries, lawyers and estate planners are integrating Coda’s Go Wish cards into end-of-life discussions with their clients.
- Education about end-of-life care options
- Guidance in sharing experiences for both embracing life and for end-of-life planning
- Providing positive ways to encourage professional and religious communities to hold end-of-life discussions and to provide Advance Directives.
- Bringing organizations, communities, leaders and research centers together to overcome barriers to end-of-life conversation, care and preparation.
- Implementing social change in end-of-life care and conversation
- Expanding the languages available for GoWish
The Coda Leadership Team
Cindy Safe
Larry Kavinoky
Julie Groves
Larry Wildemuth
Jennifer Just
Dr. Gary Lee
Coda History – 16 Years of Advocacy for “The Conversation”
1999
Began as The Community Coalition for End of Life Care2001
Coda Alliance established as a nonprofit by founders Dr. Elizabeth Menkin and the Santa Clara County End of Life Community2003
Respecting Choices community trainings begin2004
After extensive research, first release of GoWish Cards, funded by the Archstone foundation2005
Continuing educational program on end-of-life conversations and Advance Directives2010
British English version of GoWish, The Conversation Game2011
GoWish available in Spanish. Now available in multiple languages through partners2014
Began building a Consumer Reports-style directory of end-of-life conversations2016
GoWish cards can be found in all areas of geriatric care, educational institutions, professional legal and financial practices, as well as private homes. GoWish app will soon be available for smartphones, adaptable to many languages
Coda Alliance Conferences: Speakers
Dennis McCullough, M.D. http://www.mymotheryourmother.com/
Geriatrician Dennis McCullough has spent his life helping families to cope with their parents' aging and eventual final passage, experiences he too faced with his own mother. In this comforting and much-needed book, he recommends a new approach: Slow Medicine.
Dr. Dennis McCullough has been an "in-the-trenches" family physician and geriatrician for 30 years. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School.
Dr. McCullough is a member of the American Geriatrics Society, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, and the American Medical Directors Association, as well as the coauthor of The Little Black Book of Geriatrics. He lives with his wife, the poet Pamela Harrison, in Norwich, VT.
Maggie Callanan http://www.maggiecallanan.com/finalgifts.htm
Since becoming a hospice nurse in 1981, Maggie Callanan has studied, taught, and written about death and dying. This includes the unique and symbolic communication of the dying, which is often labeled as "confused language" and consequently often ignored by professional and family caregivers. Addressing medical, personal, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life's final journeys, Maggie delivers practical, no-nonsense answers to difficult questions tempered by humor, wisdom, and compassion.
She is the co-author of the celebrated book Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness Needs and Communication of the Dying, which is now published in ten languages.
