With permission.
Seated: Bernadette Digiulian,Jean Kelley, Stephanie Farber. Standing: Randy Reinhold, Sue Bender, Bob Jaeger, Karen Wies
When he was still living in Boston, Randy Reinhold read a story in The New York Times about Beacon Hill Village, a unique not-for-profit organization that started there in 2002. The “village” enables seniors to remain living independently at home — with the help of a network of community services. A decade later there are 200 villages across the nation, including East Rock Village in New Haven. Now Reinhold and his team want to start a village on the shoreline.
The Beacon Hill story resonated with Reinhold. “I said to myself …when I get some time, I am going to look into it.” He found the time when he retired two years ago as chief of surgery at the Hospital of St. Raphael in New Haven. Several friends expressed interest, including Stephanie Farber, who is active in politics and community life in Branford, and Bob Jaeger, an investment adviser who lives in Guilford. Reinhold is president of the new organization; Farber and Jaeger are vice-president and secretary/treasurer, respectively. (The full board is pictured above.)
In a recent interview, Reinhold and Farber drew the broad outlines of the village project. They said they hope to launch shoreline village a year from now, some time in the fall of 2012 if everything falls into place. Residents of Branford, Guilford and Madison, with a combined senior population of 10,000, will get the project underway. If all goes according to plan, East Haven and perhaps other towns will follow.
The idea of the organization, a not-for-profit, is that much as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to help seniors live independently as long as they are able.
This Wednesday, Nov. 16, Shoreline Village CT will hold an informational meeting at the Blackstone Library from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Members of the East Rock Village in New Haven, which has been operating for a year, will discuss their experience and the services they provide. Click here to read more about the organization.
Villages across the nation have learned from one another and now know how to avoid the pitfalls that can lead to failure. Not every village has succeeded, primarily because it had too few members, charged too little or opened too soon.
Villages Expand
“This is innovative for this area but it has a track record. There is one in Mystic; one in Canaan, one in Danbury, “Reinhold said. “It is new to this area, but not new to the country, which is actually helpful, because people might say, I am not sure this is going to work and I can say it has worked in 200 other communities around the country. “We are not inventing this out of whole cloth.”
Seniors have choices. They may leave the state to live closer to their children. They may retire to other states where living is cheaper. Sometimes they wind up in cookie-cutter retirement homes where activities are organized by others. Some sell their homes and move to established retirement communities, like Whitney Center in New Haven. But some want to remain exactly where they are.
“I live in place I never want to leave,” Reinhold said. “My children and grand children love to come here. When I read that piece (in The New York Times,) I said, you know, if I ever go to an extended care facility my children are never going to come visit me. Why would they come to visit me at Evergreen Woods,” he said of an upscale retirement facility in Branford.
Farber echoed his words. “I love my home. I love Branford. I want to stay here as long as I am able to,” she said. “We all have our own interests. We are all very independent. We want to continue that. And this is the way to facilitate that.” She lives in Pine Orchard with her husband Len. Reinhold lives on Linden Avenue in Linden Shores, with his wife, Rita Berkson.
The Costs
Reinhold said the senior population along the shoreline is expanding. What Shoreline Village CT plans to offer is a plan that charges couples $1,000 a year and singles $700 a year for services. Outside help may mean a ride to a medical facility or the grocery story, a new partner for the bridge game, a trustworthy dog walker, and a meal delivered when they need one. The village will not own real estate or directly provide medical care.
The aim is to attract 150 members in order to open and to expand to 200, perhaps 300 people over time. At the outset Reinhold said the village will need a minimum of about 200 people, 100 individuals and 50 couples, possibly more. Given the fees each group would pay, the village would draw annually about $150,000. The costs of an executive director, secretary, marketing person, office needs, might require additional fund raisers, at least at first. Membership is an ongoing issue, he says, because each year about 15 people leave the village. They move, they need full time nursing care, their finances change or they die.
But think of the savings, Reinhold said.
“Let’s look at the math. Let’s make it simple, say a $1,000 for a couple. A nursing home for a couple would cost 150,000 a year. If you can delay it for a week or two you save an enormous amount of money.”
Reinhold added “what people need the most is transportation and access to health care or more supportive healthcare,” most of which can now be found on the shoreline. No longer do residents need to go to New Haven, he said. And that is good, he said, because emergency rooms are not the healthiest places in the world.
NYR
One thing this group has learned is that the topic isn’t easy to talk about. In fact they have an acronym for the issue. “We say they are NYR’s, Not Yet Ready, ” Reinhold said. “These are folks who are perfectly able and don’t think they are going to need any help. It is true — at the moment. But then the unexpected thing might happen and all of sudden, they join.”
Keeping a social network is important to seniors. Farber said “one of the things that happen when you get older, they say, is that your social networks shrink. People retire, move out of town, move in with their kids, and get sick. We lose them in various ways. The village would be a way to expand and keep a social network going.”
Reinhold said he asked the village-to-village network (all connected via the internet) to give him real life examples of how the villages in their area worked during Tropical Storm Irene.
“They did a variety of things. They helped pick up porch furniture and put it away. They had people come by to check to make sure you were okay. They provided transportation to safety if people needed it. This provided great security for adult children wanting to know how their parents were doing. In some cases, it turned out that adult children were paying Village fees for just this sort of security.
Farber told the story of just such an adult child calling First Selectman Unk DaRos after he couldn’t get through to his mother. The phones were dead. “Could you make sure my mother is okay,” he said to DaRos. So DaRos went out to her house and found a tree in the middle of her living room, with a raccoon in it. It turned out Mom was fine.
But getting folks to talk about this issue, this group has found, is not easy. Farber says “talk about issues people don’t want to think about. We have had several public meetings and it is clear folks hadn’t talked about this yet.
“They learned about the village and then went home and started talking about it. They came back to us and said, keep me on your e‑mail list or they said, you know what, we realize we will go to Whitney Center if it comes to that. Or they said I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own. Or I may have to go live with my kids.
“They begin to have a conversation which is a difficult thing to do,” she said.
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Kudos to Mr. Reinhold for spearheading this initiative. i read the same article and thought at the time, that Branford would be a place to embrace this concept. This is forward looking and realistic at the same time. Most of us do want to remain in our homes and be independent as long as we are able. The kinds of things that might prevent that from happening are the things that the "village" addresses. Getting assistance for the things that we might have difficulty doing ourselves.
I believe this concept should become part of the conversation for a new senior center. The needs of seniors go far beyond having a place to go to during the day, the new generation of seniors wants to be as independent as possible.
This may help some of us actually realize that goal.