Meet Ambassador Leilani Stone
- Leilani Stone
Leilani has a fun spirit and is full of energy and enthusiasm. She likes to lighten very difficult situations by participating in the fun activities that she organizes for kids with burn injuries. Leilani continues to be very involved with the local community because, as she says, “sometimes it does take a village.”
Leilani is the mother of two boys. When her one son was 14-years old, he was burned in a propane gas explosion. He spent 3 weeks in the hospital and another year in recovery. Driven by her newfound passion to help burn survivors and their families, she left her career as a Program Manager for a detention center and began working as the director of Burn Survivor Services for the Burn Institute. She found MSKTC’s burn resources very beneficial for burn survivors and their families. Leilani incorporates these resources into the work she does now to help families in burn recovery.
Why does Leilani want to be an ambassador?
Leilani found MSKTC’s resources to be very clear and evidence-based, which has helped to inform her about her son’s recovery. As the Director of Burn Survivor Services at the Burn Institute, Leilani works to instill best practices on how to treat and manage burn injuries after clients are released from care, including managing the effects on families. She wants to continue disseminating MSKTC resources to burn survivors and their families in the burn community.
What has Leilani done as an ambassador?
At the Burn Institute and the University of California San Diego Health Regional Burn Center, Leilani works with the clinic’s social workers to disseminate MSKTC’s burn resources to clinicians and burn patients and their families. Wanting a way to condense all MSKTC’s information and make it easy for people to access, she designed a postcard with a QR code that links to the MSKTC burn resources page. She also emails patients and their families’ links to MSKTC’s resources. Leilani shares MSKTC’s Spanish resources with Spanish-speaking clients and the large Spanish-speaking community in her area, which has been helpful.