Work · Interview
The Mentor I Almost Said No To
A hospital chaplain turned hospice-care founder on the phone call that changed her career, and why she almost didn't pick up.
Rosa Villanueva was six years into hospital chaplaincy when a former professor called about a hospice startup that needed a director of patient care. “I almost let it go to voicemail,” she says. “I had a whole plan, and it didn’t include this.”
She took the call anyway, then the job, then built the organization that now serves eleven counties.
“The best career advice I ever got,” she says, “was to stop treating the plan as more real than the person standing in front of me.”