History
Celebrating 50+ years!
In 1971 Mary Lucille Kinlein, at the time a nurse educator, moved with a vision she’d had of a new way of caring with people. Central to that vision was listening to people without putting their words into a box that fit the professional person’s expertise. She saw that there was a kind of “gold” inside of people that got them through the long days and the hard nights. Her intention was to help the person build on this “gold.”
Miss Kinlein ‘hung out her shingle’ as an Independent Nurse Generalist. Clients came. Nurses around the country invited her to speak and began to study with her. Time magazine and many nursing publications wrote articles about her practice.
Soon, Kinlein realized that what she was doing did not fit into the practice of medicine. Clients had recognized the difference and had begun to call it “kinlein" care. They told their families and friends to go see the “kinleiner.”
Those who studied with Lucille Kinlein became the First Generation Kinleiners. Those kinleiners, together with Miss Kinlein, embarked on the development of the new “profession” of kinlein. The approach to setting forth this new profession was to eschew the ruthlessly regulated and ponderously protocoled way in which other fields and professions were established and built. These kinleiners wanted to carve out something more helpful than what was; something that built on all that was good and strong and wise in the person, something that respected personal responsibility, something that assisted people in living life rather than intervening in people living life. And it happened!
Miss M. Lucille Kinlein proclaimed the founding of the profession in 1979. However complete the concept was within the Founder, those that studied with her received only the fragments she could articulate at various points in time. After more than a decade of study, Miss Kinlein and those students, brought the fragments of the theory into a whole. By 1995 the early kinleiners had studied, applied, and conceptualized within themselves the theory of moving in esca.
By 2005 the profession was firmly established with a professional organization, a professional journal, kinleiners in practice and an institute with the purpose of education and research. The components, concepts and processes of the theory of assisting clients in moving in esca could now be taught to a new generation of student kinleiners.
Today, her work is the solid gold upon which many others are building. Kinleiners are in practice across the nation and have discovered many avenues of caring-with persons.