Jodie’s Prom At Duke Children’s

Tiarra Garner dances with nurse Arial Harris at the 2018 Duke Children's Prom.
Tiarra Garner dances with nurse Arial Harris at Jodie's Prom for Duke Children's. Photo by Shawn Rocco.

Jodie's Prom is an annual spring event where 100+ current and former Duke Children's pediatric patients ages 12 and up and their families have a chance to dance the night away in the lobby of Duke Children's Hospital. Kids can also enjoy arts and crafts, food, and the ever-popular photo booth to document the memories!

Support for Jodie’s Prom for Duke Children’s is provided by the Jodie Neukirch Elliott Fund at Duke, Meg’s Smile Foundation, the Division of Child and Family Mental Health and Community Psychiatry in the Duke Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, and Duke Children’s Health Center.

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What is the prom like?

Check out the video and article below to see for yourself!

Young man dancing at prom

For One Night, a Hospital Lobby Turned into a Dance Floor

Sporting colorful dresses and suits, prom-goers snapped pictures and shared laughs in the hospital's lobby-turned-dance floor at Jodie's Prom for Duke Children's.

Read the Article & Watch a Video

Duke Children’s Prom Renamed “Jodie’s Prom for Duke Children’s”

Jodie Neukirch Elliott
Jodie Neukirch Elliott, MSW

Since 2017, Duke Children’s has held an annual prom for adolescent and young adult patients and their families. Each year, more than 100 patients and their families have participated in the prom. Jodie Neukirch Elliott, MSW, a Duke social worker and leader of adolescent and young adult programs, coordinated prom from its inception in 2017 until her untimely death in 2022.

Jodie spent countless hours working with adolescent and young adult patients from the Adolescents Transitioning to Leadership and Success (ATLAS) program to plan the most recent virtual proms, even after having had a heart transplant in March 2020. Jodie died in August 2022 related to her chronic heart condition. In honor of her dedication to the Duke Children’s Prom and to adolescent and young adult patients at Duke, the prom has been renamed Jodie’s Prom for Duke Children’s.

Jodie’s devotion to young people and their families is an inspiration for us all. Her creative energy was exemplified by her development and delivery of the online Duke Children’s Prom during the pandemic. More than 170 members of the Duke community and Jodie’s family and friends have supported a fund at Duke—dubbed "Jodie's Fund"—to support adolescents and young adults and programs in Jodie’s honor. 
 

Donate to Jodie's Fund
 

Learn More About Jodie

Jodie Neukirch Elliott, MSW, passed away at the age of 39 in August 2022. Throughout her life, Jodie used her personal experience with congenital heart disease and deep commitment to young people with chronic health conditions to create interventions and support models, directly help youth as a therapist, and mentor the next generation of healthcare transition practitioners and researchers.
 
Jodie’s legacy lives on through the healthcare programs she led, developed and championed to support children and young adults with chronic medical conditions. As a Clinical Social Worker and the Clinical Director of Adolescents Transitioning to Leadership and Success (ATLAS) at Duke University, Jodie managed multiple programs for young adults with chronic health conditions and served as chair of the Duke University Healthcare Transition Taskforce. These programs include:
 
- ATLAS Leadership – A peer mentoring program in which high school students receive group mentoring monthly with college-aged peers also navigating the challenges of chronic health conditions.
 
- ATLAS LEAP (Leadership, Experience, Advocacy and Progress) – A peer support program for individuals between the ages of 18-28 that provides peer mentoring similar to ATLAS Leadership, helping young adults move towards independence and into adult healthcare.
 
- ATLAS Campference – A four-day summer leadership program (part camp and part conference) for adolescents and young adults with chronic health conditions.
 
- Peer coaching programs and related research – PiCASO (National Institutes of Health study on self-management of chronic health conditions), CHASM (young adults with congenital heart disease) and Bobby’s Coaches (young adults with cancer).
 
These programs, along with the curriculum and methods Jodie developed over the course of her career for peer mentoring and healthcare transition, are nationally recognized and have served as a model for similar programs across the country. Her lasting impact will be felt in the coming years as the thousands of young people and families supported by these programs go out and make the world a better place, as Jodie did. She made countless children and young adults with chronic illness believe that they, too, could live fulfilling and meaningful lives, and pursue their dreams despite the challenges of their health conditions. She was a role model and beacon of light to innumerable patients, colleagues, friends and family members.
 
Jodie’s work is celebrated annually at the renamed Jodie's Prom at Duke Children's Hospital, an event she organized for several years. After Jodie's heart transplant, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022, she transformed this in-person event into a virtual prom, leading a team to put together virtual festivities that brought together hundreds of young people with chronic conditions and their families across North Carolina. For the virtual prom, she engaged diverse partners for creating videos, including Broadway dancers, musicians, and even the lemurs from the Duke Lemur Center. Watch the Retro Prom 2022 recap below for a small sample of the joy Jodie brought into so many people’s lives, and read more about her legacy in this Duke Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences article announcing Jodie's Prom.
 
 
Prior to joining the Duke University team in 2017, Jodie worked at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, where she was a Clinical Social Worker and longtime Program Director of The Adolescent Leadership Council (TALC), an award-winning transition-focused program serving dozens of teens with chronic illness, their parents, and college-aged mentors. She received a Promising Practice Award for Promoting Adolescents’ Strengths from the American Academy of Pediatrics (2012) in recognition of her leadership of the TALC program, and a Brite Lite Award from Hasbro Children’s Hospital (2012) for her exceptional patient care. She co-authored dozens of academic publications, journal articles and peer-reviewed presentations.
 
Jodie was born in Chicago and was a graduate of Dartmouth College (2005), the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Pathobiology (2008), and Boston University’s School of Social Work (2015), where she received the Carolyn Jacobs Prize, presented annually to an outstanding graduate student with a commitment to social work practice in health care. It was at Dartmouth, at the age of 18, that Jodie began to develop her passion for youth health care transition work. As a young person with congenital heart disease transitioning to college, Jodie became a leader of the Steps Towards Adult Responsibility (STAR) program, which brought together college and high school students with chronic conditions.
 
Throughout her life, Jodie strived to develop models for and provide support to adolescents and young adults growing up with chronic health conditions. Her energy and passion for this work lives on through the ATLAS programs at Duke, other programs modeled after this work across the country, and the hundreds of colleagues and students with whom she worked over her 20-year career. Throughout her life, she was defined by so much more than her heart disease—she was a brilliant scholar and mentor, a talented swing and blues dancer, a compassionate therapist, an artistic quiltmaker, and a “heart health hero” recognized nationally at the Woman's Day Red Dress Awards (2010). Jodie’s personal story about the importance of the Affordable Care Act for patients like her with pre-existing conditions was shared online by then-presidential nominee Joe Biden (2020). She always set her goals high and her dreams even higher, achieving many of those dreams with her boundless energy, ambition and care for others. All who were fortunate enough to know Jodie have been forever changed for the better.

 To view the original memorial website built by Jodie's family, visit: https://memorial.jodiesfund.org/

“No one will judge you about, ‘Oh, you had cancer,’ or ‘Oh, you can’t walk.’ Everyone’s just out there dancing and having fun!”
— past prom participant


Duke Children’s Prom History

Isabel, a hospital patient, connects the conga line during the 2018 Children's Prom
Isabel, a hospital patient, connects the conga line during Jodie's Prom for Duke Children's. Photo by Shawn Rocco.

The annual Duke Children’s Prom started in 2017. The event is organized by the Division of Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. 

The prom has been made possible by support from the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Department of Pediatrics, and Duke Health. Major financial supporters have included Meg’s Smile Foundation, the Duke Hospital Auxiliary, The Pratt Family Foundation, Headbands for Hope, and the generous donors to Jodie's Fund.  Each year, Jodie's Prom relies on staff volunteers from across the Duke Health system and on help from the Duke Men's Lacrosse Team, Duke Women's Soccer Team, and the Duke Men's Basketball Team to help make prom smiles happen.

Learn more about our past proms:

Supporting the Prom

If you would like to support the prom and other ATLAS programs, please click on the Donate Now button below to contribute to Jodie's Fund.

If you would prefer to send a donation by mail, please address your check to Duke University and write "ATLAS (Dr. Maslow)" in the memo line. Please mail the check to:

Duke Health Development
ATTN: Emily Espenshade/Jodie's Prom
300 W. Morgan Street, Suite #1000
Durham, NC 27701

Donate Now
 

Please contact Emily Espenshade (emily.espenshade@duke.edu) with any questions about donations.

For questions about the prom or other ATLAS programming, please contact us at atlas@duke.edu or 919-385-0842.