Serving Seniors’ Growing Needs Requires Partnerships

Serving Seniors’ Growing Needs Requires Partnerships

Regular readers have heard me use a variety of terms to describe efforts to address the needs of the growing numbers of older adults both here in our downtown community and throughout Manhattan.

These have included “senior-friendly” and an “aging-prepared community.”

They’re words intended to provoke an understanding of the need for transformation of various services, both in their breadth and scope, that can improve the prospects of growing old in the community with a high quality of life and with dignity.

At Village Care of New York we’ve spent a lot of time over the past 30 years, and especially over the past decade, dedicated to that proposition.

While we take great pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish, we by no means do it alone. There are many wonderful not-for-profit organizations in our community with which we have partnered and affiliated. We have supported them; and they have supported us.

It’s a good thing, too, because when we take time to look around at the numbers of older adults and analyze their needs and demands – something Village Care has been doing formally since the mid-1990s – there are tremendous challenges.

Most recently, we’ve looked back over the first year of operation of our Neighborhood Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NNORC) undertaking that we call “The Heart of Greenwich Village.” This program builds upon the successful efforts of the Village Senior Information Center, walk-in and support space located in a storefront on Seventh Avenue, which opened in 2002.

Our “Heart” NNORC program covers only a small slice of the community, between West 8th and West 13th streets. Yet, within that neighborhood live 1,700 persons over 60 – half of them living alone, making them at risk for social isolation, a self-care disability and a variety of other problems, including depression.

It’s a predominantly white cohort (83 percent) and the majority are women (64 percent). Forty-three percent are over 70, and 35 percent have incomes of less than $25,000 a year.

In the first year of the new NNORC program, Village Care reached out to these seniors, and directly we have so far served more than 330 with services such as case management and with assistance with benefits and entitlements. We negotiated group discounts so people can obtain personal emergency response systems and licensed home care assistants for chores and companion services at reduced rates.

We’ve partnered with other organizations, such as The Caring Community, with which we implemented and filled up weekly exercise classes. This is also one of the major activities of our efforts to prevent falls, a significant source of disability for older adults. The instructor is a physical therapist who assesses participants and helps with referrals for outpatient or home-based therapies.

Through “The Heart of Greenwich Village,” we meet with each senior and listen to his or her concerns, and when needed we help provide connections to local agencies with which we have developed a good relationship and trust their services.

Among organizations we work with, I mentioned The Caring Community, which also provides meals-on-wheels, home repair and additional case management, but others include: VOLS, a group of volunteer lawyers who help seniors on limited incomes with legal issues and entitlements; the Hospital for Joint Diseases; Visiting Neighbors; St. Vincent’s Department of Behavioral Health, and SAGE. The Heart of Greenwich NNORC works with the Stein Senior Center’s “safe streets” program.

We established an advisory group of seniors, asking them along with visitors to the Village Senior Information Center for advice on what services are in most demand in the neighborhood. The most sought-after, they told us, are:

-Health insurance assistance.

-Legal assistance, especially with housing matters.

-Home attendant, chore and escort assistance.

-Personal emergency response systems.

-Friendly visiting.

-Physical therapy and group exercise.

-Home safety assistance, including repair and de-cluttering services.

One of the critical issues we know that seniors living in the NNORC boundaries face is a battle to continue living in this neighborhood. Daily, the NNORC is faced with seniors who are at risk of eviction or who are being denied basic services by landlords trying to move them out, looking to replace them with younger, higher-paying tenants.

The program provides considerable help with tenants rights, individual advocacy, access to benefits and entitlements and other financial assistance that can help them pay the rent.

And we provide emotional support during these battles.

We estimate that over the past year we have kept at least 40 seniors in their homes who otherwise would have been forced to leave.

If you live in the NNORC area and would like to learn more, you can call or visit the Village Senior Information Center at 51 Seventh Avenue (212.337.5800).