She works twelve-hour shifts caring for oncology patients at Anna Jaques Hospital. She cheers from the bleachers at Northern Essex Community College basketball games. She bakes sweet treats for the players, answers the phone at odd hours, and has held more than a few young men together during some of the hardest moments of their lives. For Elizabeth Stratton— NECC nursing alumna, oncology nurse, coach’s wife, and, to many, a second mother — there is no off switch.

Community isn’t something she builds. It’s something she simply is.

Stratton graduated from NECC’s night nursing program in 1997, a path she found not through planning, but through a moment of grace she has never forgotten. At 18, she was pregnant, concerned about facing judgement from others, and trying to navigate college away from home while pursuing a degree in social work— a field she quickly realized wasn’t right for her.

(L to R): NECC President Lane Glenn, NECC alumna Elizabeth Stratton, NECC men’s basketball coach Darren Stratton

It was a labor and delivery nurse who treated her “just like any mother having a baby,” who planted the seed that would grow into a 27-year career.

“It was transformative,” Stratton says simply.

Her husband Darren— longtime head coach of NECC’s men’s basketball program— encouraged her to enroll in NECC’s night program, which allowed her to study while raising her son. She set her sights on labor and delivery, built her foundation in med-surg, and eventually found her way to the floor she’d dreamed of.

Six years in, everything changed again. Her mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Liz, pregnant with her third son and preparing for maternity leave, became her mother’s primary caregiver, driving her to Dana Farber in Boston for treatments. Long days that started before sunrise and didn’t end until evening.

Those car rides, she says, were “wonderful.” They talked about everything. Stratton isn’t afraid of hard conversations— a trait her work in oncology has only deepened.

A chance encounter led her from labor and delivery to oncology. A former colleague and hematologist, upon learning she might not return to nursing, essentially refused to let her go. His insistence, and her own fear after senior clinicians nearly missed a critical complication in one of her patients, pushed her toward a new chapter. For 19 years now, she has worked in oncology.

“I didn’t think I could love anything more than labor and delivery,” she says. “Oncology is just… it’s my place.”

What keeps her grounded through the weight of that work? Faith, she says. And the patients themselves. “Oncology patients are very inappropriate— they just say what they want to say. They have this no regret, no filter. They want to be normal. They just want to be seen.”

Stratton gives them the space for all of it; the laughter, the grief, the hard days and the euphoric ones. On the commute home, she takes the back roads— the long way as she calls it. She prays. She processes. Then she shows up again.

At NECC, she has shown up the same way for decades. As Coach Stratton’s players came through the program— many of them young men navigating hunger, educational gaps, the absence of family support— Stratton and her husband, both products of working-class upbringings themselves, recognized the need and met it quietly. Baked goods. Study sessions. A shoulder. A phone call. She helped NECC’s Athletics Hall of Famer Nate Proulx pass his Anatomy and Physiology class. She even went in on a day off to help deliver a former player’s baby.

“I really don’t do big things,” she says. “I just do little, small things. And you find out later that it mattered.”

Those who know her would disagree with the first part. To the generations of NECC students who found in her something they needed, Stratton has done something very big. She has made them feel seen.