SLI Committee reviews September Summit

CHELAN – Due to schedule conflicts, the Senior Living Initiative Committee met on Oct. 17 at Heritage Heights to review the summit’s takeaways and plan a new workshop.

The evening of the summit, a Potential Topics for Community Forums survey was given to attendees. Only 10 of those surveys were collected back, the results as follows:
• Seven out of 10 were interested in Home Safety/Fall Prevention:
Senior exercise groups (SAIL), Life Line Button, Scams targeting seniors, home safety/surveillance cameras
• Six of out 10 were interested in receiving information regarding further events, Caregiver Resources and Support Groups
• Four of the 10 showed interest in Respecting Choices in the last one to two years of life workshop: Palliative Care, Home Care and Hospice, Funeral Planning

Other ideas included preventative health care, Medicare issues, grants to aid those who need in-home assistance.

“I am just bringing it to us, because if Senior Living Initiative wants to aid or see a priority for these topics that we should put them down and put some energy into organizing those,” Mary Murphy stated.

TLC Program Coordinator Claudia Swenson, suggested to bring in Sheila Brandenburg as a guest speaker. “we had a wonderful presentation by her, she’s the Okanogan County Palliative Care Nurse … her background is 10 years at Jamie’s Place and her brother had dementia … she was also a Hospice Nurse …very rural oriented, she understands some of the situations that are similar in Manson and Chelan.”

Murphy is sure they could organize a panel of speakers, “we could probably craft a very good agenda to cover a number of those things and have a number of forms available for people to take away.”

A separate time would be set up for such meeting. The next step is to find a sponsor for it, SLI is thinking that a health care organization is the best potential sponsor. Concie Luna will approach the Lake Chelan Wellness Foundation to see if they are interested in sponsoring the panel.
Swenson informed that TLC will take on Fall Prevention and SAIL exercises, “we will piloting that one next month.”

Murphy presented the results from the NCACH CHI survey, the survey involved a question regarding top barriers to health identified by county. In Chelan-Douglas Counties, Grant County and Okanogan County all share transportation being a barrier.

SLI frequently hears about transportation issues and it is the second thing TLC volunteers tackle.

The results from NCACH correlate to the some of the issues in town.

The committee then had a discussion about the summit. Amanda Ballou described it as, “intense, I thought people were very quiet and they were soaking it like sponges, no body left and everybody was very concentrated, it was really quiet. That was my take on it, they were very hungry for the information we presented to them.”

She stated that the Board realized that “there’s a sense of urgency, people want it to see it happening.”

Ballou also noted that when the first summit was held in 2016, the people who attended wanted the Campus of Care for their parents, but now they want it for themselves.

“Personally I was disappointed that Rotary did not attend … whereas the Rotary was well represented and enthusiastic during the first summit,” Ballou added.

Kathy Miller thought there was confusion concerning  different funding options. Murphy thought it was helpful to address the nonprofit status, the values and the vision. “There’s different rules for different organizations and not everyone knows that,” Murphy stated.

Based on past experience Ballou believes three million dollars could be raised in the community towards the Campus of Care facility, “we want to do that because pto see that the community is invested in it.”

However, a fundraising campaign will not be started until after the land has been acquired that way the community can see it is actually happening and would want to contribute.

The Heritage Board will sit down with Bryan Ketcham and talk to him due to his expertise in the independent living arena. “We plan on having an strategic planning retreat before the end of the year to put it all together,” said Ballou.

Since there’s quite a few new Board members, they are also going back and reviewing the objectives and criteria that were set, “we are looking at it to make sure there’s still consensus on those criteria we developed in our workshops two years ago and if there’s no consensus and if there are new criteria the Board wants to apply it at this time, we discuss it,” Ballou added.

The next SLI meeting will be held on Dec. 12 from 5 to 6:30 p.m.