By Jack Cumming
The surgeon general offhandedly equated the ill effects of loneliness with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The senior living industry latched onto that with alacrity. Aha, went the thinking, we offer congregate living, and that’s the antidote to loneliness. Thank you, surgeon general, for giving us a marketing boost.
Loneliness
Not so fast. The truth is that many who are living in senior communities go unnoticed or unliked. Many of them are lonelier than they would ever have been if they weren’t surrounded by happy people having fun and connecting with each other. Senior living operations get so caught up in everyday administrative tasks, occupancy, and bottom-line business results that the purpose of ameliorating the transitions of old age gets taken for granted.
Often, at industry gatherings and elsewhere, I hear senior living leaders saying something along the lines of, “What we do is so wonderful. Why are we so misunderstood?” The answer to that perplexing question may lie in the disconnect between “sense of place,” the physical surroundings, and “belonging,” the human side of aging.
What’s missing is the secret sauce of ensuring that everyone, and that means each and every single resident, feels like they belong and have a home. That’s hard to achieve in a business environment that houses old people collectively. That fundamental cohousing rationale for the senior living industry can easily be out of mind because it just seems too difficult.
Origins of the Secret Sauce
In my smaller world, i.e., the local community where I live, the secret sauce has a name. The name is Kim Shea. Kim Shea started in senior living by caring compassionately for a neighbor who had fast-moving multiple sclerosis. After his death, she took a job as activities coordinator for Seacrest Village Retirement Communities in Encinitas, CA. Kim had found her dream job, but there was a catch. The residents needed her all the time, yet she was a single parent and that came with responsibilities.
She had no choice but to leave that job. She earned a related master’s degree at the University of California San Diego and started a business to help people age. She began with a website. She worked with clients who felt lost. She developed an intuitive sense of how to help them find themselves again. Helping a person who has lost all hope to find purpose and meaning in life is a beautiful calling, and it’s essential to the belief structure of senior living.
Discovering the Secret Sauce
This brings us to her breakthrough insight that provides that secret sauce that so many senior living communities lack. Kim Shea started working with the local senior center to provide “friendship circles” for older people. Anyone could come, but the circles were most valuable for those working through the frantic effects of spousal loss, sudden disability, loss of cognition, and other downers of aging.
The results were that friendships were formed among people who might otherwise have thought that no one would want to be their friend or who had lost the only friend they thought they would ever have. As one man put it, “My wife died, and I didn’t know how to make friends.” He came to a friendship circle. Kim noticed him in an animated conversation with another attendee. She suggested, “It’s lunchtime. Why don’t you two go to lunch together?” And they did.
Kim went a step further. There were complaints of dining cliques. Kim turned that around. She would gather complainants, bring them together, and then suggest that they dine with each other to form a new clique. When it’s your own friends, it’s not a clique. It’s a matter of feeling included instead of excluded.
Toward Better Living
Some senior living communities have social workers on staff, and some social workers have the intuitive matching or listening skills that elevate Kim in her work. But too often, the social side of senior living is left to a “life enrichment director,” which is a fancy term for an “activities director.” Typically, activities directors keep a calendar with a bunch of events much like the daily patter of a cruise director on a ship. In some communities, notably Kendal, residents themselves handle the responsibilities of the life enrichment director. That’s empowering.
Kim’s involvement, that secret sauce, runs so much deeper than an activities calendar. It reaches out to individuals where they are along their life journey. She helps them to come into a sense of belonging, that special feeling that people have in loving families where everyone is accepted. I know. You’re thinking, “Many families are dysfunctional and full of tension.” Newsflash. So are many senior living communities. They need Kim’s secret sauce to become all that they can be.
Overcoming Obstacles
Kim has tried to bring her friendship circles into senior housing without the success that she’s had with the senior center. Senior housing, whether for-profit or not, is resistant to expenditure. Typically, a potential contractor in the socialization space, like Kim, is referred to the life enrichment director. There, Kim is often seen more as threat than opportunity.
I imagine a time when someone like Kim Shea can run educational programs for life enrichment directors, so the focus can shift from resident amusements to resident self-realization and empowerment.
