Why We Volunteer: Youngest Family Member Follows Multi-generation Service Tradition


Honey can barely wait to see her friends again. By early 2020 Honey, the youngest (and furriest) member of Benny and Lynn LaRussa’s family, had visited Ascension St. Vincent’s Bruno Cancer Center every week for more than two years. When she and Lynn routinely exited the Center’s door in March, they couldn’t imagine a pandemic […]
How Donor Dollars Saved a Rock Star: “I never imagined it would be used on me.”


For more than a year J. Ryan Humphreys, M.D. campaigned for an Ascension St. Vincent’s East Emergency Department ultrasound machine. “It was kind of my baby,” he says. “I thought this would be a very valuable piece of equipment. So, the Foundation got it for us, and it was fantastic.” Humphreys was so proud of […]
The Pooles’ Remarkable Story


It was early Monday, January 9, 2017 when Conyers and Lucy Poole arrived at Ascension St. Vincent’s Birmingham. After a perfectly normal first pregnancy, Lucy was scheduled to be induced. Later Conyers would remember snow on the ground from Friday’s storm, and realize that if little Max Poole had come a few days earlier, many […]