As the co-founder and Executive Director of Connecting a Caring Community (CCC), Lisa Kodimer has spent over a decade studying what happens when people choose to show up for one another. What began as a special needs baseball program her then-11-year-old son Kole dreamed up has grown into a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with more than 300 active volunteers and a network of programs serving women, men, teens, adults with special needs, and entire families. The organization is built on one belief: that connection is not a nice addition to a good life. It is the foundation of one, a belief Hillside has put into practice by sending staff to serve alongside CCC volunteers for the past two years.
Hillside Memorial Park & Mortuary has long understood this truth. Our work is rooted in Tikkun Olam, the Jewish principle of repairing the world through action, and we see that principle at work every time a family, a friend, or a stranger chooses to show up for someone else. Over the last two years, that has included Hillside staff joining CCC's volunteer days in person, not just supporting from a distance. We spoke with Lisa about what community truly does for people, and why building it deliberately matters more than most of us realize.
The Ripple That Starts with One
CCC did not begin as an institution with a five-year plan. It began as a family deciding to act on love. When Kole Kodimer set out to create a baseball league for children with special needs, neither he nor his mother could have anticipated the scale of what that ripple would become. Kole's dream was to help the special needs community play the sports he loved, and through that work, Lisa and her family encountered other families navigating similar questions about purpose and belonging. One of those families would eventually become the co-founders of CCC itself, a ripple that, two years ago, reached Hillside's own staff and brought them into the volunteer rotation.
Looking back, and with Hillside volunteers now two years into that same rotation, Lisa reflects on how that origin carried a lesson she has never stopped teaching: “I knew I needed to inspire more people than just myself. I didn’t know it would inspire the community to the degree that it did, or how contagious it would be. We just knew we were a normal family that had to start with a handful of people, and that this ripple effect would be powerful and amplify.”
What started with 12 women in a single program is now 300 volunteers strong, spanning multiple groups and demographics, with Hillside's team among the names that have shown up for the last two years. The lesson embedded in that growth is simple and durable: you do not have to see the full horizon. You only have to take the next step toward another person.
Why Community Cannot Wait
One of the most important things Lisa has learned is that community is not something you assemble when you need it. It is something you build long before that. The bonds that carry people through hard seasons are rarely forged in the moment itself. They are the result of years of small, consistent presence: a shared meal, a volunteer afternoon like the ones Hillside staff have shown up for over the past two years, a phone call that had no agenda.
It is a philosophy Hillside has tried to live rather than simply admire, joining CCC's volunteer programs for two years and counting. “There’s nothing more important and profound than community,” Lisa says. “Community is always going to be there to help fulfill needs, but why not build community before that? It’s a missing link when you don’t have it. Community helps you link to the next person, to the next person, to the next person.”
She returns often to a line from Helen Keller that has become something of a north star for her work: “Alone you can do so little; together we can do so much.” It is a simple truth, and it is total. People can feel isolated even while surrounded by others. The remedy is not proximity. It is real, tended, reciprocal connection built over time, the kind Hillside has tried to build simply by returning to the same events, month after month, for the last two years.
For anyone who feels they have no community to lean on, Lisa’s message is direct and open-armed: “Either allow us to embrace you, or come join us, and let us embrace.” Hillside has taken her up on that invitation for two years running, showing up as one more set of hands rather than staying at a distance.
What Showing Up Actually Builds
CCC's growth from a handful of volunteers to a network of hundreds shows something important about community: it compounds. Each person who shows up for one program, Hillside's own staff among them for two years now, becomes a connector to the next person, the next family, the next need that gets met. Lisa describes it as contagious, and the word fits. Community does not grow through grand gestures. It grows through consistent, ordinary acts of presence that accumulate into something people can rely on.
That accumulation is the point. A community built in advance, through years of shared meals and volunteer afternoons and unremarkable phone calls, is what actually holds when something significant happens, good or hard. Lisa's work with CCC, and Hillside's two years of standing alongside it, is proof that intentional, ongoing connection is not a soft value. It is infrastructure.
Community as a Hillside Value
For the past two years, Hillside has put that belief into practice directly, joining CCC's volunteer programs rather than simply supporting them from afar, and Lisa's philosophy resonates deeply with the values at the center of our work. Tikkun Olam calls us to repair the world through action, not abstraction, and CCC's model of showing up for one another, one person and one program at a time, is that principle in practice. It is also the spirit behind our belief in Traditions for a New Generation: that the ways we care for each other are passed down, adapted, and carried forward by the people who choose to keep showing up.
At Hillside Memorial Park & Mortuary, we see our role as more than a place people come to at a single moment in time. We aim to be part of the ongoing community that surrounds a family: the traditions, the relationships, and the shared sense of belonging that make a life feel held. For the last two years, that has meant more than words. It has meant our own staff showing up with feet on the ground at CCC volunteer events, sleeves rolled up alongside the families Lisa serves. Lisa's decade of work with CCC is a powerful reminder that community is not incidental to a meaningful life. It is one of the things that makes a life meaningful in the first place.
Learn more about community and family life at Hillside:
hillsidememorial.org
