St. Jude educator shares love for hospital ahead of Dream Home Giveaway ticket launch
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - This year’s St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway comes with some of the biggest prize packages in the campaign’s history!
Every ticket helps St. Jude kids and the mission of St. Jude, And we’re less than two days away from your chance to be a part of it!
This mission is near and dear to the thousands of people who work at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and each one of them is special in their own way.
But there’s something extra special about Marshetta Brazley-Rodgers.
If her bright smile, contagious friendliness, and tender spirit don’t grab your attention, her love for the work she does at St. Jude certainly will.
Brazley-Rodgers finds much purpose in her job at the hospital.
“It is very fulfilling when I work with patients and families to help them understand that they have control over the things that happen to them, over the direction that their life takes and I can help them to exercise that,” she said.
For more than a decade, Brazley-Rodgers worked as a teacher and administrator in public schools.
She currently serves as school advocacy coordinator for the St. Jude School Program by Chili’s - a job she never saw herself doing.
“I knew that St. Jude was here,” says Brazley-Rodgers. “I knew that they served kids with cancer I saw the commercials, but I didn’t know there was a place for me here as an educator. When I saw that they had a school and there was an opening for someone who would like to connect patients and families with school resources, I thought, ‘that’s me, that’s my jam.’”
Three years later, Brazley-Rodgers is still rocking and rolling with the life-saving hospital.
The native Memphian has a bachelor’s in music therapy from Tennessee Technological University, but she found her true calling when she got her second degree from the University of Memphis.
The Tiger alum says she loved her previous job, but she knew she had to go back to school to fulfill her true passion.
“Every Monday,” says Brazley-Rodgers, “I got to work in schools in the special education classroom and I liked my job, but I loved Mondays. I loved Mondays, and so after about a year of doing, that I thought, I could like my job one day, or I could back to school and love every day.”
Brazley-Rodgers can confirm she loves all five days of her work week at St Jude.
She recalls one of the many reasons why:
“I was having lunch, and I dropped my water on the floor, and I went to clean it up, and I couldn’t find it because the floor was so shiny, it was just so clean, and I thought, ‘everyone here takes such pride in the work that they do,’ because they know that in the end, it’s in service of children, from people who clean the building, to people who research medicine, to school coordinators to the doctors, everybody just does such a great job because we understand what the end is.”
An end that hopefully leads to a new beginning: a world where kids live cancer free.
Action News 5 and St. Jude have partnered for the 24th annual St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway in 2023, with proceeds benefitting the hospital. Tickets are available beginning Friday.
If you reserve your ticket on the first day, you could win:
- Season tickets for the Memphis Grizzlies
- Season tickets for the Memphis Tigers men’s basketball
- A weekend getaway at the Peabody Hotel
- AND the chance to win the St. Jude Dream Home worth almost $600,000!
For more information on the St. Jude Dream Home, click here.
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