Sometimes It Takes a Senior Village
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Using volunteers within and outside the community, a new movement offers simple services that help older adults stay in their homes. The village movement also fosters a sense of community. Click here to view article.
Louise, a widow, doesn’t want to move out of the home where she and her husband raised four children, but she’s not able to drive as well as she once did and is having a hard time doing small chores around the house. Fortunately, she belongs to a “village” community, where a fellow member can drive her to the doctor or climb a ladder to change a light bulb.
A 2010 report by AARP found that 90 percent of adults want to remain in their own homes as they get older. One of the big problems is lack of help with simple tasks. Offering assistance to older adults living at home, a new movement relies on volunteers and bargains for other services, such as plumbing, at cheaper rates. To fund the services they need, village members pay annual dues, which typically cover the cost of a staff person (or persons) who coordinates services. In addition to dues, some villages receive grants, donations and other funding.
The village concept began in Boston’s Beacon Hill in 2001 when a group of neighbors came together to develop services that would enable them to remain in their homes and community. Since then, 89 villages are operating across the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, with another 123 villages in development, according to Village to Village Network, which offers resources for village communities across the country.
At its most basic, the village movement fills the gap between totally independent seniors and those who need some form of assisted living but not in an institutional setting. Older adults may need assistance for simple tasks, such as cleaning out gutters or shoveling a driveway, although the biggest request isfor transportation.
On a deeper level, the village movement provides a sense of community, as members join together to set up the village and help each other. In some villages, volunteers are solicited from the community, thus providing interaction with younger adults.
Villages Around the Country
In Chicago’s Lincoln Park Village, seniors call the village for whatever they need. The two-year-old nonprofit serves 230 members in 165 households. Lincoln Park members pay an annual fee: $540 for individuals and $780 for a household of two. Those with incomes below $50,000, a fifth of members, pay a reduced rate, as low as $100 annually, and receive a credit toward any expense. (New York Times)
With its dues, Lincoln Park Village was able to hire two staffers who, with many volunteers, provide referrals to approved services—home care agencies, handymen, lawyers, financial managers—that often offer member discounts. The village also partners with Rush University Medical Center, where members can schedule appointments with specialists or receive counseling.
Members and student volunteers also contribute time. One member drives others to doctors’ appointments, a university student helps a 68-year-old with her paperwork and a 50-year-old member and librarian visits a retired librarian in her 70s.
In Madison, Wis., one program enlists university pharmacy students to make sure seniors aren’t overmedicated. Results showed that nearly 80 percent of the seniors checked were having adverse drug reactions. (US News Money)
In Pittsburgh, the Mount Lebanon Village program works with volunteers and schools to provide intergenerational activities, including a day of light sporting events and a personal history project, where seniors are paired with students who learn about an older person’s life story. (US News Money)
In Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill Village, founded in 2007, now has 350 members. The village has student-senior mentoring programs and a network of young professional volunteers in the Washington area who are separated from families and looking to connect with older adults. (US News Money)
California, the Bay Area in particular, is one of the fastest-growing regions for villages. (San Francisco Chronicle) In February, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave $50,000 each to two San Franciscan villages—San Francisco Village, with more than 220 members, and Next Village San Francisco, which has just over 60 members. “In this city, 40 percent of the residents will be 60 years of age or older in 17 years,” explained board president Jonee Levy about the need to plan for the future.
The first village in California, Avenidas Village in Palo Alto, started operating in 2004, helped by its affiliation with an existing nonprofit senior center. It now has more than 350 members and has established alliances with healthcare organizations, including the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, El Camino Hospital, Stanford and Kaiser Permanente.
Some California villages have received grants and other support from nonprofits, including the Archstone Foundation, a Long Beach grant-making group focused on meeting the needs of the aging population.
Challenges for the Movement
While some villages acquire monies from outside sources, funding is always a problem, especially for low-income groups. Most villages charge an annual fee of $400 to $700, according to the national Village to Village Network. That can be a high a cost for low-income people, who are often the most in need of such services. To remedy this problem, at least one village has a different model. ElderHelp of San Diego is supported largely by philanthropy that provides intensive support services to a largely lower-income group of seniors. The goal is to use the village model to demonstrate cost-effective solutions that much more expensive government programs traditionally provided. (US News Money)
However, the private sector is not always a dependable source, so village leaders around the country are looking toward the Affordable Care Act’s provisions to fund wellness and long-term care programs.
Although the annual fees might seem like a lot of money to an individual, the costs are small compared to the price of a nursing home or home health care. The annual average cost of a private room in an Ohio nursing home, for example, was $81,213 last year, according to the insurance and financial company Genworth. An assisted-living facility cost an average of $44,550, while home health care cost $43,197. (Columbus Dispatch)
It’s projected that 45 percent of American households will be headed by someone who’s at least 55 years old by 2020. As the country grapples with the challenge of paying for higher Medicaid and Medicare costs, and as older adults try to figure out how to make ends meet on sometimes shrinking budgets, the village movement offers a low-cost alternative while creating a sense of community and offering seniors the option of staying in their homes.
Challenges of Starting a Village
The job of creating a village—incorporating as a nonprofit organization and drafting bylaws, and business and financial plans—can be difficult. At a recent Washington, D.C.-based conference sponsored by Beacon Hill Village, AARP and NCB Capital Impact, an Arlington, Va. nonprofit, speakers provided advice about the real work it takes to start a village:
- Time: It takes time to launch a village. Make sure timetables are realistic.
- Founders: The founders—often a core group of six to eight people—need to be passionate and have a shared vision for creating their village. Ideally, they should have skills that the village needs, including business management, fundraising and membership development experience.
- Organization: Have a business plan before you begin, not after. Become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Make sure you have liability insurance for village directors and volunteers.
- Funding: Explore founders’ grants (tax deductible once the village achieves nonprofit status) to raise early funds.
- Affiliation: Being affiliated with an area institution can jump-start a village, provide credibility, grant access to free or inexpensive resources and offer the comfort that you have a partner.
- Internet: Build a website early in the process. The site can help market the village and act as an invaluable and cost-effective communications tool to support village operations.
- Management: Choose an executive director who is passionate about the job, because salaries tend to be low. And because money is always tight, the director needs to be effective at acquiring resources for little or no money.
Source: Adapted from US News Money
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