Jo-Ann Lautman

Jo-Ann Lautman is the kind of person who notices when someone is standing alone and decides to do something about it. Not once, but for the rest of her life.

Warm, persistent, and deeply rooted in her city, Jo-Ann is a native Angeleno who still lives in the home her grandparents built in 1936. She went to school in Beverly Hills, spent her college years in Boston, and came right back. She calls herself a "grief maven," and there is something about the way she says it that tells you she earned the title through decades of sitting with people in the hardest moments of their lives rather than through any credential on a wall. She has carried that belief through more than forty years of grief work, and it is the reason people who have worked alongside her tend to describe her not just by what she built, but by who she helped when no one else was paying attention. She is a breast and lung cancer survivor whose own family knows the disease too well. She co-authored a novel called Tears and Tequila that brought the grief group experience to fiction. And she is still, after all of it, the same person who saw a need no one was filling and refused to look away.

Her path into grief work started with a young widower in one of the Mommy and Me classes she was leading in West LA, whose wife died without warning. It continued at Cedars-Sinai, where she watched a bereaved family member walk out of the hospice and just stand there on the sidewalk, alone, with no place to go. People assumed young grievers would bounce back, find someone new, move on. Jo-Ann saw something different. The pain and confusion of those young people, she has said, was the most profound she has ever seen. So she built a place for them. She called it OUR HOUSE because she wanted the people who came to feel it was really their own. "Their House?" she once said. "No, Our House. It belongs to all of us." The first office had two improvised living rooms and a trompe-l'oeil window where a painter changed the scenery each season, because even at the beginning, Jo-Ann understood that a place meant for grieving people should still feel like someone cared about making it beautiful. More than thirty years later, the room she made is still open.