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Mary has been consulting since 2002, working with several hundred nonprofits, including associations and all-volunteer nonprofits. Her executive experience began with a small nonprofit ($100,000 budget), which she grew by leading two nonprofit mergers into one of the largest nonprofits in the California Bay Area-with 530 staff and a budget of $25 million. Mary has over forty years of experience in the nonprofit sector-twenty-six as an executive. Mary is a coach and mentor for boards, individual board leaders, and executive directors. She works with nonprofit leaders to strengthen the executive/board partnership and develop the board as a powerful force for organizational and mission results.
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Mary Hiland, PhD is a nonprofit board and leadership development consultant dedicated to assisting nonprofit executives and board members in unleashing their organizational and community impact potential. This is a memoir woven through my observations of who my mother was and who I am. You will find some touching moments, some troubling ones, and some that are relevant to your own life. What makes my story unusual is that I tell it with blindness always in the background. In The Bumpy Road to Assisted Living: A Daughter’s Memoir, I not only describe the move, my mother’s adjustment to a foreign way of life, and the emotional trauma for both of us, but also offer some advice and comfort for others who are experiencing such dramatic changes. The logistics alone were merely the start of my uphill struggle with this daunting task.ĭuring the last two years of my mother’s life, I learned many lessons about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and she learned to accept the difficulties of being in her late nineties and living in an assisted living community. But unlike most adult children, I had to deal with this crisis as an only living child who is totally blind. Like many adult children who want to respect their parents’ wishes, I didn’t take action until it was unavoidable. Making the decision to move an elderly parent into assisted living against his or her will presents myriad challenges.