About
Welcome from the Founder
Welcome to our new website! Palette of Faith is 
a coalition of health care and faith community leaders dedicated to meeting the holistic needs of patients and families facing end-of-life issues. Our interfaith call to action is to ensure that all people will remain connected with their faith community throughout all the important seasons of life, especially illness, end of life, care giving, and grief. Through outreach, education, and communication, we are striving to empower medical staff to share information with clergy; to empower patients and families to inform health care organizations about how and when to share information with their designated clergy members; and to create and make available educational materials that faith leaders can share with their congregations and that health care staff can share with their patients and families. I invite you to our 2nd annual conference. Link on the tab above for all of the details. You can register online. We have listed an extensive list of websites, papers, articles, and lectures under “resources” and welcome your suggests for adding other resources. Please join us. Enter your name and email address in the box on the right side of this page. Note our next meeting date and time in the box on the right. Walk right in and share in our mission.
Sarah Friebert, MD, Director, A Palette of Care, Haslinger Division of Pediatric Palliative Care, Akron Children’s Hospital.
Our Mission
Palette of Faith is a coalition of health care and faith community leaders dedicated to meeting the holistic needs of patients and families facing end-of-life issues.
Our Vision
- Providing a regular forum for idea-sharing between health care professionals and faith community leaders on ways to better serve the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of patients and families
- Receiving and communicating to health care professionals the ideas and concerns of the faith community
- Offering education, resources, and outreach to the faith community
- Convening periodic conferences and workshops through which the health care and faith communities can advance their knowledge and share ideas about emerging concepts and opportunities in matters related to end-of-life care.
The Coalition
Recently, local palliative care health professionals and faith community leaders joined together, under the leadership of Dr. Sarah Friebert, Director of the Haslinger Division of Pediatric Palliative Care at Akron Children’s Hospital, to establish a coalition whose purpose is to share ideas on how better to serve individuals and families facing serious illness, care giving, end of life and grief.
When individuals and their families face serious illness, care-giving, end of life or grief, they often turn to their faith communities for support. We recognize that spirituality is a critical dimension of the care needed by our patients! Health professionals, who often have first contact with these families, often feel ill-equipped to provide spiritual support and need the help of the faith community.
We believe that a partnership between the faith and health communities is ideal for meeting the complex issues of end-of-life care. Goals of the coalition are to enhance outreach, communication and education. The potential is great for a lasting relationship where knowledge, resources and support are shared.
What’s in a Name? – Palette of Faith
“A Palette of Faith” is a name that was created to represent our interfaith partnership to engage our community in a dialogue about caring. The name is based on “A Palette of Care,” the name given to the Pediatric Palliative Care Team at Akron Children’s Hospital. Our Palliative Care Team brings legendary comprehensive, interdisciplinary support to children of any age with a life-threatening illness and their families. In choosing this name for our palliative care team, we envision that we offer every patient and family we care for a blank canvas and a brush. By offering a palette of different colors, or paint pots, that symbolize different disciplines or services – like medicine, nursing, case management, massage therapy, nutrition, spiritual care, bereavement and social work – we enable families to dip their brushes into the colors that they need to create a picture of quality of life for their child. Similarly, A Palette of Faith seeks to break down barriers between the health care community and the faith community so that patients and families can seek and receive the information and support they need during illness, end of life, care giving and grief. By making available a palette of opportunities, educational materials, resources, and domains of expertise, we hope to enable the community to partner more effectively to create meaningful connection during life’s challenging journeys.
Dr. Sarah Friebert
Sarah Friebert, MD, FAAP, FAAHPM, is the director and founder of the Haslinger Family Pediatric Palliative Care Center at Akron Children’s Hospital. Dr. Friebert and the team of specialists she leads are nationally recognized for their contribution to improving life and alleviating suffering for children facing life-threatening and chronic/complex conditions and their families. She also directs the ACGME-accredited palliative care fellowship program at Akron Children’s Hospital. Dr. Friebert founded and chairs the Ohio Pediatric Palliative End-of-life care Network (OPPEN), a statewide coalition representing pediatric palliative care and hospice providers.
Dr. Friebert received her medical training at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. She completed her residency in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and her fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. Dr. Friebert is board certified in pediatrics, pediatric hematology/oncology, and hospice and palliative medicine. She is president of Akron Children’s Hospital medical staff. She is associate professor of pediatrics at Northeast Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy (NEOUCOM) and a consulting medical director for NHPCO.