Charles Garfield, Ph.D.
Charles Garfield, PhD, is the founder of: Shanti, an internationally honored volunteer organization dedicated to the care of the dying, the elderly, and those living with cancer and AIDS; the Shanti National Training Institute, which has taken Shanti’s model to organizations around the country and world; and Shanti’s newest program that serves older LGBTQ individuals. He has been teaching the skills of serving vulnerable people for more than forty years and is a pioneer in developing service-oriented volunteer organizations in which peers, not professionals, become “the difference between zero and one” for people at the end of life and, more recently, seniors in the LGBTQ community. For more than four decades, as a clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco (UCSF), Dr. Garfield continued his work in the care of dying patients and their families, many of whom were elderly. He is the author of Our Wisdom Years (Central Recover Press).