Nita Corré said that whenever “things got tough in my office” during her years as president of the Jewish Home and Care Center, “I would go up to [speak with] the residents. That was important to me.”
Corré said she likes to refer to the residents of the home as “professors of life. The people who live in our facility make the Jewish community what it is today — they always have something to teach.”
She added that whether the residents spoke of their “achievements or regrets,” they all have “beautiful stories to tell. The residents always gave me more then I could give to them,” she said.
Corré, 67, who has provided over 30 years of service to the JHCC and has served as its leader for a majority of that, will be honored at a gala dinner, “A Tribute to a Lifetime of Caring,” on Sunday, May 22.
Corré was the president of the JHCC until 2003, and is now president of the Jewish Home and Care Center Foundation.
Born in Gibraltar, she studied accounting, economics and business in London before marrying Rabbi Alan Corré at age 19.
As the wife of a rabbi, Corré began visiting nursing homes in Philadelphia, where the couple first resided. It was then she decided that “I wanted to work with the elderly,” Corré said.
She and her husband moved to Milwaukee about 40 years ago, when Alan joined the Hebrew studies faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. At the time, the youngest of the couple’s four children was four weeks old, Corré said.
Soon after arriving, Corré began volunteering at the JHCC on Sunday afternoons. She enjoyed it so much that she went back to school to earn both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work, doing her field placement work at the JHCC.
When she got her degree, the home was moving from the west side to its current location on Prospect Ave. Corré was hired as a social worker and a case supervisor.
After working several years in that position, Corré held a variety of different titles, and was in charge of the facilities beginning in 1978.
Team effort
Corré credits her success to many people she has worked with over the years, including residents, their families, JHCC board members and volunteers.
“I’ve always felt like a bottle of glue,” Corré said. “The pieces did not belong to me. I just put them together.”
According to Mina Tepper, the current president of the JHCC, however, Corré did more than that.
“She is incredibly visionary,” Tepper said. “She has greater fiscal astuteness than anyone I’ve ever met. She took this home from being in an indebted situation to where it was profitable and well-respected in the nursing home community.”
“Her actions,” Tepper continued, “have enabled this community not to have to worry about funding for the elderly.”
Corré has also been recognized on a national level for her work with the executive board and committee of the Association of Jewish Aging Services, for which she served as chair for two years.
Marty Stein, a co-chair of the tribute for Corré, as well as past president, chairman and member of the JHCC board of directors, said that Corré is the “best executive that I’ve seen in a not-for-profit in all the many years in my experience.”
She possesses “both fiscal expertise and management expertise, but most of all, she has compassion for the people that we serve,” he said.
She has “tremendous love and affection for the well-being of everyone and their families.” Tepper said. “It’s truly amazing.”
Corré, whose family has been devoted to community work through the generations, said that throughout her years at the JHCC she has “never compromised my independent relationships. I’ve never gone home without visiting a resident who wanted to see me.
The individual was always foremost in my mind.”
That attitude is part of what Corré calls her “responsibility as a leader,” part of her “hope that I have done it through the eyes and ears of the individual.”
There have been many people who have touched my heart, who I remember every day of my life,” she said. “I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to do the work I have done.”
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