A fake tree with lit butterflies graces the main gathering area of the new Dorion Family Pediatric Center at Community Hospice & Palliative Care in Mandarin. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 11, 2026 at 4:26 pm
Free local news and info, in your inbox at 6 a.m. M-F. Sign up for the Jacksonville Today newsletter.
Jacobo Lopez maneuvered his wheelchair into the new Dorion Family Pediatric Center just moments after he helped cut the ribbon officially opening the facility at Community Hospice & Palliative Care’s Mandarin campus.
Left with injuries from a car crash some years ago that are serious enough for the 18-year-old to use hospice services, he also volunteers to help children and families who also need the Sunbeam Road facility’s pediatric services.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
But as he went into the 8,300-square-foot facility on Thursday, he realized that one of the butterflies released during the ribbon cutting was on his shoulder. He smiled as he remembered that his late sister, Sofia Garofolo, loved butterflies too.
“I feel amazing. When I walked in, I wasn’t expecting it to be this beautiful,” he said. “With the butterfly on my shoulder, it felt amazing because tomorrow will be one year and one month without my sister. … I love helping others as well with similar disabilities as me, and I just love to help.”
Community hospice has had pediatric programs for decades, going to homes to help children deal with complex medical conditions and to help their families work through their deaths. But assembling all of its Community PedsCare services into a new facility built inside the main center is a first-of-its-kind in Florida, and “the heart of everything we do,” Community PedsCare facility director Patrice Austin said.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
“We have serviced families in the home for quite a while,” Austin said. “But now we have created a space for them to come together. What people need is each other as families who know what is going on; they need each other to be able to cry with, to talk with, to compare with. They have a home now. … Everything out there that normal kids can go to, these kids can’t. But they can here.”
Hospice was founded in 1979 and now operates eight facilities serving 11 counties in north-central Florida. Its programs include PedsCare, launched in 2001 to provide hospice and palliative care services to young people up to age 21. Community PedsCare’s 30 staff members now work with 325 families and their children, all services free, Austin said.
Ground was broken in February 2025 on the Dorion Family Pediatric Center at the hospice campus at 4266 Sunbeam Road. The hospice foundation raised the $10 million cost for a facility named after Dottie Dorion, who helped found community hospice in the 1970s and is the center’s honorary fundraising campaign chairperson. As she spoke before the ribbon cutting, Dorion said donations from so many helped it become “the greatest gift of all.”
“My late husband George and I had the dream,” Dorion said. “May this center inspire other hospices across the country to do the same, to create joy of a happy place for children where they feel at home and provide their caregivers the much-needed rest for themselves, knowing that their children are being lovingly taken care of.”
Hundreds of people, including children in PedsCare and their families, attended the event before heading inside to see a facility that Community Hospice President and CEO Phillip Ward said is “making history.”
“We ripped through our front doors; we demolished our great room; we took out our courtyard and built a building inside of a building,” Ward said. “This organization has always had the courage to disrupt what was to create something that had never been before. I am excited to share with you what I believe is a masterpiece. When you walk through this building, you are going to see what we have created together.”
The facility’s main entrance has a wall covered with ivy and butterflies. Inside is a tree-shaped fireplace, a library that looks like a castle and a huge fake tree with more illuminated butterflies.
A therapeutic play room is available to reduce anxiety and overstimulation, and a gathering area provides a space where family members can reflect or join in activities. Young patients have a therapy and arts room, as well as a music therapy area to help develop motor and language skills and manage their emotions. There is also a family bereavement support center.
Joining Jacobo Lopez was his mother, Maria Munoz, who called the new facility “just beautiful,” as she showed a photograph of her son with the butterfly perched on his shoulder taken just minutes earlier.
“It’s going to be a wonderful place for the children, parents and caregivers. It’s just amazing,” she said.
Her daughter “used to love butterflies,” she said. “When there was a special event or something happening important, a butterfly showed up. And now a butterfly is on his back. It’s like, I got your back. She would always say to him, ‘I got your back, Jacobo, don’t worry.”
Austin said she also hopes the Dorion center becomes a model for pediatric hospice programs around the country. It allows “families a place to call home and get wrapped around by the PedsCare team, and they don’t ever have to be alone again.”
