Senior Living Initiative Summit brings housing experts to Chelan

CHELAN – The Senior Living Initiative committee held their second Summit on Sept. 26 at the Chelan Senior Center.

Concie Luna opened up the summit by saying, “the input is what drives this whole thing … with certain amount of anticipation we are going places folks, it’s exciting to be on that train with you and see where it is we are going.”

“I guarantee there is some interesting information we can pull from,” said Luna as she presented the two guess speakers.  

That evening, Catholic Charities Housing Services Director Bryan Ketcham and Architect John Shoesmith presented on project each of them has worked on before having to with affordable housing for independent living and small house environments for memory care.

For his part, Ketcham provided an overview of the agency he works with and also talked about the general development in Prosser, Wash.

“I have been the Director since 2009, we just celebrated this year our 20 anniversary last month. We got our start in multi-family housing right here in Chelan, Casa Guadalupe was the first development it had already been built, but we acquired it  back in 2000. It had been run down a bit, it had not been properly managed, it needed some rehab after just 4 or 5 years of operations and that was our launching point,” said Ketcham.

The Catholic Charities Housing Services Board had a vision, “they wanted there to be a residence services component into the work that we did and they wanted to be an opportunity for homeownership,” he explained.

In 20 years, Catholic Charities has built 23 communities in four counties in Central Washington which equal to over 800 units and about 80 percent of those units serve farm workers and their families and 10 percent serves Seniors with three independent living sites.

“Affordable housing is really central to community development, it’s not just providing an opportunity for families to live that safe and affordable and a healthy home. It’s also an economic drive, it creates jobs in the community, it supports jobs in the community in the long term,” said Ketcham.

In each of the communities there is a community center in which they provide resident services program, they focus on crime prevention, education, health and nutrition, community engagement and economic opportunities.

“Over the last four years we have been measuring graduation rates in our sites … these are all farmworkers families, all very low income, we can see that last year there were 93 percent of graduating seniors … by far we are having a positive impact on families and we are helping families move out of poverty,” Ketcham stated.

He also explained that Catholic Charities is seeing that with “a combination of affordable housing and the availability of services and connecting families to opportunities, we work in partnerships with a lot of different organizations, when you do that well, you do have those impacts in the community.”

Catholic Charities has two sweat equity programs to best fit family’s needs, the first one requires 250 hours of sweat equity and they are required to work on their own home.  The second one is a mutual program, “families put 1,000 to 1,200 hours on their homes and they are required to do at least 30 hours a week and these homes are built in a group, each family signs an agreement, no family can move into their home until all homes in that  built group are completed … you are building communities as you are building homes,” explained Ketcham.

In 2007 – 2008, efforts from Catholic Charities began in Prosser, after several years this three phase development finally came to life. It is a site of 12 acres, “the first phase was 51 units of farm working housing and workforce housing, the second phase is still in process and it’s 27 single family homes and the third phase was Saint Anthony Terrace.”

Due to timing phase three became phase two and vice versa, “the single family home are yet to be constructed, we hope to start construction in Spring,” claimed Ketcham.   

“The intent here is that you have families, younger families that are stabilizing in their housing and you have families who have worked and provide the opportunity to keep homeownership … and then with the senior elderly it provides an opportunity to bring the kids we are providing services to in our multi-family sites and bring them over and integrate them with the seniors,” Ketcham added.

For example, “while this development was in construction we had kids do small pieces of art to welcome the seniors and we hung those throughout the development.”

To wrap up his presentation, Ketcham said, “the funding sources are so limited that it really takes good partnerships and many partnerships to be successful in this endeavor … its really is a big team that comes together to make these developments happen.”

Luna took a few minutes to recognize Mary Murphy, “Mary has been our director guide on this journey, asking questions, giving suggestions, directing how we function, asking more questions, I would like us to recognize Mary for all her work.”

Then Luna introduced Shoesmith. “I will be talking about primarily small house environments for memory care. Memory case is something that we have talked about as a need in your community, I want to talk about some of what is going on in that,” said Shoesmith.

Shoesmith explained that research has shown that those who need memory care assistance do better in smaller groups, “the research puts it at about 12 people, that way the social environment doesn’t become overwhelming.”

He went on and described the green house model by Dr. Bill Thomas, “it was a house that was created with 10 people around living, dinning common space and it looked very much like a regular house, but there’s  skilled nursing.”

“There was a huge study being done by the University of Minnesota, they went in to a number green houses and they did a big study that looked at measurable quality of life outcomes from people living here, and in fact there were,” Shoesmith added.

Since the green house model was a very successful model, Shoesmith stated, “Dr. Thomas ended trademarking the green house, and to built a green house you had to follow a number of protocols.”

Even though it was neat idea, people from on from green houses and instead focused her attention on a “parallel movement called small houses.”

One big challenge the green house come from the economic side, researchers found that it cost too much and having only 10 people living in such houses wasn’t enough to help compensate the costs.

“They also came around and found that if you stack 12 to 14 residents around that was actually the magic number, in terms of efficiency and operational piece,” added Shoesmith.

Shoesmith has been part of different committees around the nation, “one of them was related to memory care, I had the pleasure of sitting with Michael Smith who is the President of the Alzheimer Resource Center and he said something that has stocked with me for two reasons,” said Shoesmith.

He continued, “the first is the idea of because of people have dementia we believe that we have to design a different solution for them … and the last part what people with dementia want is no different from what others want, that’s engagement, stimulation, interdependence, personalization, connection and meaning.”

Shoesmith was able to find the answers to the remarkable statement when working with a non-profit in Tacoma, Wash., Tacoma Lutheran. “They were missing to be able to provide for their residents who have memory care issues, so we created assistant living environment for them based on the small house model,” he explained.

Tacoma Lutheran’s vision was “to create a house environment where seniors can engage in stimulating actives and live in a beautiful place.”

North Ridge at Tacoma Lutheran maximizes natural light, their doors lead to success, they have adapted technology.

“This seats on a bluff … about 9,700 square feet, each room is a private room and they all have their own bathroom and showers, the idea was to take a group of seven rooms, a group of seven rooms and then have the living dinning space and den in the middle,” described Shoesmith.

Part two will be included in the October 10 edition of the Mirror, it will feature updates on the Campus of Care progress and the In-home Care progress in the Lake Chelan Valley.