Home is a magical comfort place.
Where a meal means laughing with loved ones over an old standby recipe.
A medical record is a series of penciled-in heights on the kitchen wall.
The medicine cabinet patched up more than a few skinned knees
and the waiting room is a chair that spent years getting to know our habits.
Home is where our loved ones casually drop by, and visiting hours are as wide as the day is long.
As we grow older, our health, routines and priorities will change,
but the comforts of home should remain constant.
We know that for someone to live well in their own homes, it’s much more than being able
to look out a window that’s been washed. It’s really about how do you get out and
stay involved in the community.
We spend a lot of money on healthcare and living at that end of life, and we need to
be able to shift those dollars into supporting people to stay at home.
A lot of times in this society, especially the older generation, we’ve all grown up thinking
part of growing older is to be depressed and that simply is not true
and we’re out to prove that.
This is why we do the work we do. The services we offer are so important
and each success is a shared effort.
The longer we support older adults in their desire to live at home, the longer they thrive.
With the help of the Live Well at Home grants, we’ve been able to develop
some services that we’ve really identified as being necessary for aging adults to
maintain their independence.
By having this grant, we’re able to help these people kind of recapture the life that
they had at one point but they’ve lost through disability or aging issues.
This isn’t just about avoiding a hospital or facility, it’s about access to quality,
affordable services and support right where they live, for as long as possible.
It’s about being able to manage housework or sit with a friend, and not worry about stairs
counting medicines, or having to figure it all out alone.
We were able to bring in fitness instructors into our therapeutic rec program
and did Yoga which was really well received.
Well the work with this project, really it was astounding to
see the changes that the clients made.
With the grant we were also able to develop an education program called independence planning
and our goal is to change the story of aging.
Meaning take the scary out of it.
All the way from ‘what are you going to do with your house?’
Right down to ‘what does your end of life look like?’
It’s about helping older adults live without fear or constraint.
One simple belief, with immeasurable impact:
Live Well at Home.
