Board of Managers member Sue Zaccano: Giving from the heart
Sue Zaccano toured three retirement facilities looking for the right place for her mom. She specifically wanted a nonprofit that would continue caring for her mom after she expended her resources.
At the second place she visited, the guide suggested she try Homeland Center.
“I could tell the people were special, and we decided this was where my mom would come,” she said.
Zaccano’s mother lived at Homeland, in Personal Care, and the Ellenberger Unit for Memory Care for her final two years. After her mother died, Homeland approached Zaccano about serving on its Board of Managers.
For Zaccano, who describes Homeland as an “oasis,” the answer was an immediate yes.
The Board of Managers is Homeland’s unique, all-women volunteer group. It continues in the tradition of the 18 women who founded the “Home for the Friendless” in 1867 to care for the widows and orphans left by the Civil War. Together, its members tend to the details and little touches that give Homeland its renowned homelike feel — throwing parties, decorating, and talking with residents.
“It’s more like a home,” she said. “It’s really nice to hear the residents say that Homeland is their home.”
Zaccano retired from The Hershey Company after a 39-year career in product development, though she still works there part-time. She initially worked in research and development, later serving as part of a team developing snack items and overseeing product recipes for accuracy and quality across multiple divisions.
In retirement, Zaccano devotes her time to helping others.
She gives away her homegrown, handmade catnip toys and knit caps for the homeless. With her love for cooking and baking, she makes chicken soup with bone broth and vegetables for Homeland Hospice families. Her daughter’s Coast Guard station recently got a fresh-from-the-factory shipment of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs.
Zaccano’s daughter gifted her with a four-pack of Hershey Gardens tickets, so on her visits, she finds her companions by approaching people in the parking lot and offering them her extra passes.
“One group at Hershey Gardens didn’t speak much English,” she said. “Afterwards, the one person who did said, ‘Can I give you a hug?’”
Although she is selfless with her volunteer time, she calls it selfishness because of the enjoyment it gives her.
“I don’t expect anything in return except for the feeling it gives me,” she said. “It’s a feeling I get for doing something that makes somebody else feel good.”
Zaccano gets that feeling by helping at Homeland. She enjoys writing birthday cards to staff members and meeting the residents.
During a recent resident trip to the area’s new L.L. Bean store and Hershey’s Chocolate World, she happily used her retired-employee card to get discounts on hot chocolate for everyone. For the upcoming Board of Managers’ spring party and its “Sound of Music” theme, she volunteered to help bake batches of applesauce muffins.
Zaccano grew up in Cooperstown, NY, and worked at a Lancaster veterinary hospital after earning an associate’s degree in veterinary science. She then attended Elizabethtown College, where she met her husband. She returned to the Harrisburg area after moving to upstate New York to work as a medical technician.
Her daughter, Tahnee, a U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduate, serves as a search and rescue coordinator in the Seattle area. Her son, Mike, known as “Mushroom Mike,” has a Pittsburgh-area mushroom farm that supplies local restaurants.
Volunteering at Homeland helps give back to the place that cared for her mother – a place where the care is genuine.
“The people here wanted to know more about my mother,” she said. “It wasn’t like she was just a patient. She was a person. I feel like they cared enough about her, that she was a person and not a number.”
