Eileen Saffran has no problem inspiring others.
So one year when it downpoured during her nonprofit’s annual fundraiser, the Race for the Place 5K and one-mile runs, she knew exactly what to do. She led the 3,000 attendees — cancer survivors and their families and friends — inside and told them, “Rain is nothing compared to what people have gone through.” The rain eventually lifted, and the race continued, but her words helped make the event a success.
It wasn’t the first time Saffran, executive director and founder of the Gathering Place, a community center for those affected by cancer, overcame a storm. With 23 years as a clinical social worker under her belt, helping people going through difficult times has been a big part of her life since graduating with a master’s in social work from Ohio State University in 1976. In her first job as a social worker at Huron Road Hospital, she provided support to psychiatric and breast cancer patients. She was stuck by how cancer affected her patients’ mental and emotional wellness.
Through the experience, she learned a lesson that would lead her to make an impact on millions of lives: Providing kind words and teaching how to handle stress can improve the quality of life for people who suffer from the most taxing illnesses.
“This isn’t about being a patient,” Saffran says of the Gathering Place, where individuals affected by cancer can meet, do lunch, perform yoga, get a massage or do anything that will help them feel at ease about the disease. It has a library stocked with resources and a full-time staffer, who helps visitors better understand the specifics of cancer, treatments and even medical bills. Since the organization, staffed by health care professionals with an average of 18 years’ experience, opened in 2000, it has served more than 18,000 people at its Beachwood and Westlake locations.
The Gathering Place is the culmination of Saffran’s life’s work in health care. It took a community to build it, but that community had to be led by a strong-willed individual. Stubborn, even.
“I’m not someone that is a round peg in a round role,” Saffran says.
In July 1998, after the idea for the Gathering Place came to her — in her swimming pool, of all places — she rallied for the support of community members and city officials to make her dream a reality. They responded positively, and after 18 months of grassroots efforts, the first Gathering Place sprouted up in Beachwood. Then, four years later, Saffran raised more than $2 million to open the current 12,000-square-foot Beachwood headquarters.
The Gathering Place is an environment of enjoyment and understanding, rather than sickness and possible death, which is what Saffran had in mind after her experience with her parents’ cancers in the 1990s. Her mother and father received different cancer diagnoses six months apart. Saffran ended up spending lots of time in the hospital with her parents and caring for them at home.
“It was at that point that I understood that as far as living in the community, there was really no place to turn outside the support someone might get in a hospital,” she says.
In the decade before the Gathering Place opened, Saffran had a private social-work practice. She traveled daily to work with low-income families who a member suffering a chronic illness.
But the sometimes devastating living conditions she encountered didn’t dampen Saffran’s enthusiasm for helping others. “It was always about the blessings,” says Heidi Weiker, a clinical social worker whom Saffran mentored. “It was never about the struggle.”
The two met when Weiker worked at Saffran’s practice in the summer of 1984, when she was 16. The moment they met, Weiker was struck by Saffran’s warmth. Weiker, now 42, remembers Saffran as the kind of person who would always offer a hug, a smile, or a kind word.
“She won’t quit on anybody, anything,” Weiker says. “And she will not quit on making the biggest and most touching impact on human lives that she can make.”