Changing Aging

I encourage you to take a few minutes to read two articles that appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday (links below).  They provide insightful context to the tremendous opportunities for innovation in our profession, and Ecumen’s role in living our mission, vision and values to help lead and shape that change.

We Want to Be the Choice for Customers’ New Choices

The first story, The New Idea in Elder Care: Membership, outlines the work we and another Twin Cities-based senior services provider, DARTS, are doing to adapt Boston’s Beacon Hill Village “virtual retirement community” model in Minnesota.  The Ecumen project is in Minneapolis, and it’s called Mill City Commons.  It’s being designed to empower people to “age in place,” so they have the choice not to leave the neighborhood they love if they don’t want to.  It also leads with the social dimension of successful aging rather than the medical dimension, while integrating both. Mill City Commons is paradigm-shifting work that’s challenging us to deliver our mission of creating home in a new way, while underscoring our vision for changing aging:  We envision a world in which aging is viewed and understood in radically different ways.

We’re Making Change, Instead of Waiting for it to Happen

Star Tribune political columnist Lori Sturdevant writes in the second column Budget-Hungry Nursing Homes are So Last Century how 70% of the government dollars spent on long-term care in Minnesota goes to nursing homes.  That’s not sustainable public policy, and it doesn’t match up with what consumers want.  That’s why we’ve been diversifying – and will continue to diversify - our services across Ecumen.

The column commends our profession for “looking forward,” and highlights a citizen’s workshop held last week by the Citizens League, a leading non-partisan public policy organization.  The workshop, which involved several Ecumen people focused on shaping ideas for providing and financing aging services.  Ecumen helped convene the workshop as part of our commitment to shaping “what’s next.” 

Two forces are coming full speed at our profession and country: new consumer expectations and needs to finance senior services in new ways.  What an incredible time to be where we are today: making change instead of waiting for it to happen to us.

At least 6 percent of Americans between the ages of 44 and 70, or 5.3 million people, are working in second careers with non-profits, governments, schools, or other organizations that benefit society, according to a new survey.

And half of the people in that age group who aren’t already involved in so-called “encore careers” say they would like to find such employment — a great opportunity for professions in aging.

The survey was commissioned by Civic Ventures, a charity in San Francisco that seeks to engage older Americans in civic activities, and paid for by the MetLife Foundation, in New York. It was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,000 people.

Last week was a busy, interesting time on Capitol Hill in the area of “Changing Aging in America.” 

Three different hearings (one including Ecumen)  . . . all highlighting the need for holistic aging public policy in America - no planning in silos - so that the United States rides the age wave and people have the independence, quality of life and safety that they desire and deserve.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging urging Congress to take a more active role in the research and treatment of Americans with Alzheimer’s Disease  Justice O’Connor’s husband John has it, and another person is getting it every 72 seconds.  Her testimony is here.

Kathy Bakkenist, Ecumen COO and senior vice president of strategy and operations, testified on technology to support family caregiving in a U.S. House briefing led by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) and the National Alliance for Caregiving.  You can read Kathy’s testimony here.

And the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing about rogue nursing homes (which should be eliminated from existence).  You can read more about it here.

In many ways aging and aging solutions are local.  Ohio takes that to another level by passing property tax levies to help fund aging services and supplement shrinking state and federal government funds. 

It All Started With Lois

In the late 1970s a retiree named Lois Brown Dale was looking for financial support to build and operate a senior center in a small county in Southwest Ohio. She believed the public would support such an effort through local taxes but was informed that placing such a referendum on the ballot would require special legislation. Undeterred, she successfully lobbied the Ohio legislature to allow counties to earmark local funds for elder services. More than wenty-five years later, 59 of Ohio’s 88 counties have property tax levies raising nearly $95 million for services for older people.

A 90% Passage Rate

- These levies vary greatly from county to county in size and revenue generated, from a .10 mill levy raising $9,000 a year to a .85 mill levy collecting $21 million in the same time period.

- The specific services most often funded by these levies include nutrition, transportation, in-home services (such as home-delivered meals and home health aides) and senior center administration.

- More than 90 percent of Ohio’s senior service levies have been successful at the ballot box, with an average passage rate of 65 percent of the vote.

. . .  Enough with the headlines that depict seniors like neanderthals who live in a cave.

Here’s one today from the Hartford Courant:  Seniors Unexpectedly Receptive to New Technology.

 HELLOOOOOOO  . . . . yes, seniors do use technology, they work out, they work, they breathe, they have sex, they’re human beings.  And pretty soon America’s going to have more people with seniority than we’ve ever had. 

Time for media, policymakers, businesses and every aspect of our society to get real to America’s new reality.

If you want to read how technology is changing aging services, download our technology whitepapers or visit our technology section, where you can find other resources such as the Center for Aging Services Technologies.

 Keep it Real.

“It took me nine-months to plan for a baby; I only had 9 hours to prepare for my father’s care.”

I recently heard that statement, which rings true for thousands of Americans.

Caregiving is becoming a hot topic.  Here are a few pieces of that rising heat from the last 24 hours:

- One of the highest-attended sessions at Mary Furlong’s “What’s Next” Boomer Summit yesterday in Washington, D.C. was on caregiving.

- At the Boomer Summit, best-selling author Gail Sheehy discussed her work on the future best-seller, which will come out next year about the next “green movement” caregiving. 

- Today H.R. representatives from Twin Cities companies and other organizations gathered at Twin Cities Public Television to watch an advance screening of the PBS documentary “Caring for Your Parents,” which will premier next week.  A number of those participants shared how “caring for parents” is becoming a significant issue at their workplaces.

-And AARP just launched a new interactive caregiver resource web site.

The heat is rising . . . because we all feel or will feel it.

Soon a lot more communities are going to have more seniors than children.  Is an aging society a problem?  It very well could be.  Or it could mean some mind blowing, incredible innovation.

Stephen Aguilar-Millan is a futurist in the U.K.  His blog post The Olderpreneurs looks at how future seniors will create a “Grey Economy,” creating businesses with each other and doing business with each other.  When I look at how boomers view their work future in the Ecumen Age Wave Study, I see Stephen’s futurist view makes a lot of sense today.

For Our Twin Cities-area Readers:

Want to give 1 hour and 15 minutes in a Pilot Project for the Next Generation of Aging Services?
The Citizens League is seeking volunteers to help it test a segment of an exciting initiative it is working on in the arena of aging services. If you are interested in participating in the session on the evening of Feb. 28th below at St. Paul College, please contact the Citizens League at (651) 293-0575.   They’d like to hear from you so that they can schedule you in either the 5 p.m. group or 6 p.m. group.
Here’s Some Background
The Citizens League, a leading Minnesota non-partisan civic engagement and public policy organization, is going to be developing a citizens workshop later this year called “Imagining a New Generation of Aging Services.” (Ecumen is sponsoring the workshop). At the workshop, participants will discuss what they want in senior services and help identify new products and services to improve senior care services in Minnesota. The results will frame a follow-up body of work led by the Citizens League to determine what specifically needs to happen from a public policy perspective to turn these products and services into reality.
Your Help on February 28th
To make the workshop as successful as possible, the Citizens League is testing a portion of it on February 28th at the Citizens League Policy Open House (described in the link below) at Saint Paul College. They are seeking participants for an hour and 15 minutes at either 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. A facilitator will be asking participants to write down their vision for growing older and then discuss as a group what are the “products” that would make these visions for aging possible. There will be other things going on that evening during the Policy Open House besides this discussion, you can learn more about those below.
http://citizensleague.org/events/past/2008/02/policy_open_hou.php

Yesterday we wrote about the fragmentation in public policy around aging.  The Citizens League in Minnesota, which is one of the country’s top non-partisan citizen engagement and public policy organizations is taking a different approach to aging policy as part of their MAP 150 initiative, which is focused on big public policy issues in Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial Year.

Here’s how they describe the approach, which will begin at the League’s Feb. 28th Policy Open House event:

Ecumen is sponsoring the first phase of this project.  However, we have no clue what the outcome will be.  And that’s the beauty of the Citizen League’s work - it’s transparent, independent, citizen-based work - You can’t buy an outcome.  They’ve done incredible work on some of Minnesota’s biggest public policy issues, including a report about 12 years ago on the future of aging in Minnesota.  It helped to bring focus to aging services policy and enhance opportunities for independence for more seniors.  What also is interesting is how they bring people together to help shape solutions that you would think would never sit down with each other.

To learn more about this project and participate in it, go here.  Changing Aging readers from around the country can follow it on their web site and we’ll provide periodic updates.

A few stats this Super Tuesday:  . . . .About one in five votes in the 2004 presidential election was cast by someone 65 or older. By 2040, about 40 percent of voters will be 65 or older.

Imagine if there were a “successful aging platform” in America or in individual states, one that was about every American (we’ve all got that aging thing in common).   AARP and other organizations such as The Business Roundtable, Service Employees Union and National Federation of Independent Business see the opportunities in the electorate and are joining together to lay groundwork with the “Divided We Fail” campaign.

A few weeks ago I went to a Policy Summit Meeting attended by 500 people in Minnesota.  It was sponsored by the Minnesota Leadership Council on Aging.  They did a fabulous job in pulling people together.  As I listened to the speakers from different groups, which you can learn about here, I was struck by two things:

A.  How much passion there is around the subject of aging.

B. How that passion gets watered down because of how fragmented interests and approaches are when it comes to public policy and advocacy for aging. 

How many other states can relate to this?  I think 50.  Otherwise we would have seen aging being discussed in the Presidential debates.

Imagine if public policy ideas were crafted around several key areas of aging instead of many different agendas and these ideas were taken to policymakers with united voices and diverse grassroots support.  Imagine if this happened in every state.

Demographics show aging should be a huge public policy issue.  The next seniors - baby boomers - tell us aging is a very personal, important issue.  Now we need to craft something that Americans can easily digest and grab on to.

Posted by Eric Schubert, director of communications, Ecumen