Raised in Kentucky, Holly attended Brescia University, studying business and marketing. After graduation, she left her rural roots for urban life, first in Atlanta, where she met her husband of over 40 years, and then New York, where they had two children. During her early career, she organized and led large-scale projects and teams as Chief Executive Assistant to the Senior VP for Citibank’s New York Commercial Marketplace and as Human Resources Generalist at Coca-Cola, managing multi-million-dollar budgets and teams of 25 or more people. At Citibank, she facilitated team-building and personal-growth endeavors, training approximately 4500 employees through workshops and other organized events.

Transitioning out of her full-time professional career to focus on her children, Holly and her family moved to Summit, NJ, where they could enjoy nature and space. She dove into her surroundings, working extensively within the school system, her Temple and other local organizations to create friendships and humanitarian bonds that still continue today. Nine years into this new chapter, Holly became aware of repressed trauma. Philanthropy was her way to stay grounded and move through the journey of depression, grief and beyond, in order to heal.

During this period, she suffered a brain aneurysm. After her near-death experience, Holly developed a profound connection to the art of dying and end-of-life care, propelling her to focus volunteer efforts on death, dying and grief work, primarily via Atlantic Healthcare Hospice and The Carol G. Sienna Cancer Center at Morristown Medical Center. She provided care for patients undergoing chemotherapy and other terminal illness care.

This inspired a secondary career as an End-of-Life Doula. She completed training in thanatology, pastoral care, energy work, alternative modalities and of course End-of-Life Doula Certification. After spending many years concentrating on the quality of life for both the terminally ill, seniors and the grief community, she made it her personal mission to see that those facing these challenges were supported with the utmost respect, openness and understanding. To this end, she founded Healing Heart to Heart, where she practiced compassionate care of individuals and their families as they approached transition and helped those dealing with manifestations of grief access its full potential as a transformative experience.

After a childhood of divorce and estrangement, the death of close friends and in the wake of several traumatic personal events (flashbacks of abuse, the aneurysm, her husband's heart attack and the disintegration of her family as she knew it), Holly's own grief eventually became debilitating. It had also emerged as the single biggest factor in most of her end-of-life work, leading her to become a Grief Specialist. In addition to offering Grief Services at Healing Heart to Heart, she co-founded the initiative Taming Our Grief Ghosts. In these small-group grief workshops, the co-facilitators continue tapped into a variety of modalities and related topics to empower participants to recognize and move through loss and grief in their own lives.

Holly then become a certified Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist™, enabling her to offer evidenced-based support in grief recovery via a researched and proven modality that guides clients on a profound journey of self-exploration and completion. Through this training, she is qualified to work one-on-one and in groups, online and in-person, with adults and caregivers to children experiencing loss. Holly personally has alchemized her own losses via the Grief Recovery Method® and continues to apply it, working through other relationships in her life.

Her recent personal experiences and the general changes in the world underlined even more how ill-equipped most people are to deal with loss and the resulting grief. In this spirit, she founded Center for the Heart (C4TH), a nonprofit organization committed to providing compassionate end-of-life and grief services to all who are in need. Currently, C4TH serves the Union County area and hopes to expand its services to the whole of New Jersey soon and eventually the New York City area.

In all aspects of her life, Holly seeks to further her goal that empowerment and inner peace be accessible to all. A motivated leader, she uses stories to inspire action. Her vast and in-depth volunteer experience in multiple domains coupled with her training and structural, planning and management skills allow her to actualize beneficial ideas on an individual and group level. She serves with passion and joy, building strong, lasting relationships that continue to benefit diverse community development and nonprofit organizations for years beyond her involvement.

As she walks together with her husband in his illness, the passions that drive her are elevating end-of-life and grief experiences worldwide for all populations and supporting care for individuals, families and communities facing Alzheimer's and other terminal diagnoses. She cherishes every moment with her husband, two children, grandchild, her extended family, and two beloved therapy dogs, Athena and Sarge. Holly tries daily to tap into the wonder all around - in nature and other beings. She's ecstatic whenever animals, golf, gardening, yoga, meditation, horseback riding, traveling to sacred places, walking and boundless learning are involved.