Brooke Henderson

Former Legacy Cottage director becoming new executive director of Legacy Cares

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

After running Legacy Founders Cottage for eight years, Brooke Henderson had decided it was time to look elsewhere for new opportunities. Others have lasted only a year or two in that extremely demanding position. Legacy Cares Executive Director Melissa Grove was disappointed to lose Henderson, but the two kept in touch.

Henderson became a social worker at Baylor, but once the pandemic hit, social work came to a screeching halt, and she was transferred to the hospital’s drive-thru COVID-19 testing clinic.

Also during the pandemic, Grove began rethinking her future. After 25 years of working around the clock, she decided it was time to spend more time with her husband, Dan, and started trying to figure out a way to phase herself out of her position at Legacy.

One day, Grove and Henderson were talking, and Grove said, “I’m ready to bring you back.” And because, to Henderson, the cottage and Legacy Cares was family, she agreed.

So, the two women worked out an arrangement where Grove would hand over her position over the coming year and mostly work from home — except when she’s in Las Vegas or Palm Springs — and Henderson would spend the year becoming the new executive director of Legacy Cares.

“I have a history of giving my babies to Brooke,” said Grove, who was the first director of Legacy Founders Cottage. Now Henderson is taking over the entire family of Legacy Cares.

Henderson was raised in Amarillo and received her master’s in social work from Texas Woman’s University. She said she has a passion for medical social work, which is why she became the supervisor of AIDS Services of North Texas’ Plano location.

“I found my passion,” Henderson said of that job. “I found my niche.”

She said she used to refer clients for Legacy Founders Cottage from her former agency so, “I had this working relationship with Legacy,” she said. So when the job of director of the cottage was posted, she met with Grove, who told her she was looking for someone to make the job their own.

And from her first day on the job, she made the cottage hers.

Legacy Founders Cottage does both hospice and respite care for people with AIDS. But what Henderson found was that most of the residents she saw during her eight years at the cottage may have come in on hospice, but they ended up becoming respite residents.

Hospitals would give up on AIDS patients and send them to Henderson to die. Henderson made sure her charges were getting life-saving medication, got them stabilized and improved their health until they could be discharged to live their lives.

“They just needed someone who had more patience,” she said.

Of course, she didn’t simply save lives on her own.

“I’d go to doctor’s appointments with clients,” she said. “I’d advocate for them.”

Education was a large part of what she did. She’d teach residents about being consistent in taking their medication, “But I had to be OK with where they were in their story,” she said. One of the hardest of those stories to be OK with involved a cottage client who was diagnosed with HIV at age 16, moved into the facility at age 21 and died two years later.

“Stigma still exists,” Henderson said, explaining how, when job openings were posted, she’d get calls from people horrified with the idea they’d only be working with people with HIV — even though the listing clearly said that’s what the job was. Those who came to work at Legacy, however, became part of the family, caring for patients like loved ones.

Henderson is also already quite familiar with two of Legacy’s other programs, she said. One of those is the Grace Project, the largest conference for women living with HIV. Henderson has run the clothes closet each year during the conference, distributing clothing for participants as well as their families.

She is also already familiar with Homebase for Housing, a rental database of affordable housing which is a federally funded HOPWA program like the cottage.

Grove said the position of executive director of Legacy Cares is challenging job. “I get calls at 4 in the morning,” she said. “It takes a certain dedication to do a job like that.”

But she’s certain that with Henderson, she has the right person in place to succeed her. “This isn’t a job for Brooke,” Grove said. “It’s a calling, like it has been for me.”

Henderson now occupies Grove’s old office in the building on McKinney Avenue where Legacy’s counselors work. But, she said, she just couldn’t help Legacy’s Special Events Coordinator Cody Lynch and a friend pack up Grove’s office. Thinking about her leaving after 26 years just hurt too much.

Although she’s now using Grove’s old office so she can have the additional space, Henderson said she’s making other changes very slowly after having made too many changes at the cottage too quickly when she first went to work there.

But Legacy Cares is always changing. Housing has become the agency’s largest focus. And during the pandemic, counseling switched from in person to online via Telehealth. That opened access to mental health services to more people than ever before, Henderson explained.

While she’s learning and adapting to new ways to care for people, Henderson assures the agency’s clients, as well as its staff, she’s taking things one step at a time.

“Change is scary,” she said. “I’m just learning to fill Melissa’s shoes.”

And those are huge shoes to fill.

As for Grove, she said Henderson “is tough as nails and has a heart of gold.”