What do people do for seniors

OBERLIN — Getting to the end of my spring term at Lorain County Community College, I am nearly done with my internship with the Oberlin Recreation Department. It has been a learning experience for me and I hope to leave something of value to the city as its considers if, where, when and how to extend services to seniors in Oberlin. That was my assignment: research the topic.

Starting with an online survey of residents age 55 and older, the 10-question survey was posted to my personal Facebook page, the Facebook page for the group “You know you’re from Oberlin if,” my Twitter page, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor, which I had forgotten about as a website. The Oberlin Recreation Dept. twitter account engaged the posts.

The results of the survey are here and show that some seniors do quite well for themselves.

The encouraging news is that there is an active senior population online in Oberlin, largely on Facebook and Nextdoor. Often, hashtags are useful in tying online communities together. I can say from past professional experience that online community building is exhausting — not just because I was monitoring newspaper reader comments at 2 a.m. — but continuity is immensely important in teaching people where to go for information. And, to the point made by one of the people I interviewed recently, if we reach ANYONE, say, in a family with a senior citizen, information will get back to them second hand.

The bad news is that posting the survey the way I did necessarily creates a selection bias for those people who are already more connected and enabled by technology.

I interviewed 11 people, most from the community, posting many of those as podcasts and a few others as written interviews. Time and again in these interviews, the idea of finding, creating or supporting community came to the front. One regret I have is that I could not find a demographer to interview about the way an aging local population might change or impact the community. I even found a demographer, Dr. Deirdre Mageean, at Cleveland State University to talk me through the process of studying aging in a community. That would be an important step in making future plans I believe, part of a more formalized study as advocated by Dona Wishart, the executive director of the Otsego County Commission on Aging, also chairs the Michigan Commission on Services to the Aging.

Senior services have also been mentioned now by the Recreation Planning Commission in draft work toward the city’s ongoing comprehensive planning for the future. In being transparent on the matter, I also sit on that commission.

It’s hard to quantify the intangibles, the conversations I had with older customers at the Oberlin IGA where I work. One thing is clear: before, during, or after a pandemic, a grocery store serves as a social outlet for everyone, not the least of whom are senior citizens. It’s the type of place that proves the point that an activity that serves seniors may well serve many others also.

“I have to admit that I don’t do anything for the senior population in general. I myself, at age 67, am a senior, though that’s not how I think of myself. I do try to help my 92-year-old mom as much as possible. She moved into my sister’s house last summer, and I live next to them and visit a lot. She has spent some nights here, but it has recently become too disorienting for her to stray from her routine. I give her rides (e.g., for her COVID vaccines and to Columbus to visit my other sister), include her in conversations (sometimes she feels the “invisibility” of age and, I confess, sometimes I’m guilty of contributing to this), am patient when she asks the same question or tells me the same news several times within a few minutes,” one woman wrote to me on Nextdoor.

I remember seeing her mother around IGA.

“You may still see Mom sometimes at IGA; she sometimes goes shopping … and has even been known to sneak out to drop off a bill or go to a medical appointment by herself, though I think unaccompanied gallivanting is coming to an end,” she offered.

Then there are those of us, almost 50, who see these needs and activities on our own horizon.

“Walking outside. Safe non-slip surface, no dips or craters or pot holes, no cracks with elevated areas (so basically the bike path) but a place to park and walk…is there a place to park and walk? Or just walk for miles and turn around and walk for miles back? I miss Oberlin and it’s a shame I don’t remember if there is a place to park,” said a classmate of mine, Leah Young, when I asked people about things they do now they would want to carry with them into their senior years.

Oh, and one more thing. This has gotten me to think about my own aging in new ways. Reality or denial, I’m choosing to think about this moment as “starting my second adulthood.”

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Dr. Deirdre Mageean

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

Crossing academic streams, I put out an email request for help to the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs where I will start studying this fall. I ended up speaking with Dr. Deirdre Mageean, professor of Urban Affairs, about demographics: the effects of an aging population and how to approach surveying those changes to plan for the future. Internship aside, she is a contact I intend to keep, at least in connection to my post on the Rec Commission.

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Cynthia Andrews

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

Cynthia Andrews is the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Lorain County. Andrews found me at work one day and offered herself for a conversation about what foundation does and might do in helping any community, including Oberlin, meet the needs of its seniors, its residents, more broadly. While it does not offer direct services, it helps fund many services that are offered.

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Heidi Freas

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

Heidi Freas is the third generation in her family to own and operate Welcome Nursing Home. The average age among the residents in the 99-bed facility has dropped in her 22 years of helping to run the operation as there is a developing split between a more typical elderly population and a younger, 50s age group dealing with the affect of chronic health conditions. Home healthcare is an expensive choice to fill the gaps, she explains, even as it introduces a more socially active population to the nursing home.

With the closure of the Neighborhood Alliance building in town and the social restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, places and events to foster educational events are in short supply.

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Prue Richards

When you’re interning in your hometown, you will end up talking to friends and family about the issues at hand. I’m interning with the Oberlin Recreation Department this spring, working toward an associates degree in Public Administration. The topic: finding more ways to provide services to seniors. This is an interview with my mother, Prue Richards, who is the financial secretary for Oberlin Weekday Community Meals. Surely, they serve seniors. They serve people in financial need (and their number of meals served rose dramatically from 2019 to 2020. But when they can get back to doing meals in person — and they serve anyone, regardless of financial need — they represent a community connection that has been drawn out in conversations this spring as being as necessary as new services themselves. Community creates a connection to services. Community helps seniors access those services.

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Community survey work important to senior service success

Note: The following March interview was conducted as part of my internship with the city of Oberlin Recreation Department in the spring of 2021. The question being asked: How can the city better meet the needs of its senior citizen population? In this interview I spoke with Dona Wishart, the chairperson of the Michigan Commission on Aging. I knew of her from 10 years living in Otsego County Michigan where I worked as a reporter for the Gaylord Herald Times. She currently also works as the executive director of the Otsego County Commission on Aging. While I did record the interview, technical difficulties made it less than desirable to post as a podcast the way I did with others.

Dona Wishart, the executive director of the Otsego County Commission on Aging, also chairs the Michigan Commission on Services to the Aging, the state office that the Michigan Communities for a Lifetime came out of. Otsego County was the first county to conduct an assessment in 2007.

“The project itself is not unique to Michigan nor is it one project that stands alone,” said Wishart. “There are a number of program and assessment tools across the country that look at asset areas across the community that would be important to older adults.”

As many of these interviews have revealed, Wishart observed services shown to be important to seniors can be important to others as well.

“Public transportation. When we have buses that have lifts on them it may help mothers with strollers,” she said. Otsego County has a population of 24,000 with the city of Gaylord, population 3,500, as the business center. Oberlin is a city of 8,500 in a county of 309,000.

“The project as designed and worked on in the state of Michigan looked at a number of asset areas,” Wishart offered, listing walkability, supportive community systems, access to health care, safety and security, housing availability and affordability, housing modification and maintenance, public transportation, commerce, enrichment and inclusion among the many.

Otsego County established committee, a prospect broached in a spring questionnaire published online only as part of this internship. Roughly two-thirds of the 70-plus respondents indicated they would not be interested in serving on such a committee.

“They imagined what was good in our community, which of those needed work and which of those projects might be done with the resources available,” Wishart explained. “Probably the primary outcome was the raising of awareness of the importance of these asset areas to make our community a place that is age friendly, a place where people can age in place successfully and a great place for all generations to call home.”

Simple actions included replacing city street signs with those which had larger lettering. These actions, she explained, were not directly tied to the committee’s work but likely instead came from raised awareness of issues. As such, there was not a single or central budget that made improvements possible. The intention in raising awareness, she explained, was to access business and governments that could access funding.

Additional actions included lengthening the times to use crosswalks.

To raise community awareness and committee interest, Wishart recommended using local media outlets such as newspaper and radio advertising, but also just word of mouth.

“In a small community we know each other. I knew which people in our community were community leaders. I knew people in our community to be doers or not. There was some careful orchestration of who to ask.”

When asked about “low-hanging fruit” the committee and survey work revealed, Wishart was quick to point out the “importance of access to healthcare.”

“But then, when we talk about transportation to health care, that’s another issue,” she pointed out. “We now have a volunteer medical transportation program. Part of it involves public transportation and part of it involves volunteer transportation.” The service provides transportation to local facilities but also to specialists in other parts of the state that might be hours away by car.

“The beauty of doing an assessment for your own community is that it measures resources and fortitude,” Wishart observed.

“Our society is an aging population across this country and beyond. There has been significant growth in the older population and a shift in the demographics in each and every community.”

I would say most all communities are dealing with an aging population. For Otsego County specifically we are thinking about 23 percent of our population as being older adults. Of course different programs and services use different measures.”

Wishart, who went so far as to recommend getting a demographer involved, pointed out the country’s aging population will be “an important factor through 2030” with a decline in aging by 2050.

Other important issues Wishart mentioned included the impacts of ageism on a community, talking with businesses about aging relation to mobility, hearing and vision issues.

“Master plans should have awareness of every department on aging,” she finished.

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Rev. Duane Anderson

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

In this interview, I speak with Rev. Duane Anderson, carrying out the conversation about how, if there are activities seniors will find worthwhile, word of mouth will find its way to letting seniors know. We owe them too much, he was clear, to leave them behind.

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Neighborhood Alliance was an Oberlin senior resource center

Note: The following March interview was conducted as part of my internship with the city of Oberlin Recreation Department in the spring of 2021. The question being asked: How can the city better meet the needs of its senior citizen population? In this interview I spoke with Stephanie Clark, former program coordinator at the Neighborhood Alliance in Oberlin. We did not record the interview.

Stephanie Clark, formerly the program coordinator for the Neighborhood Alliance in Oberlin, now works as the intake monitor at the Haven Center. Prior to the novel coroner virus pandemic, the Neighborhood Alliance provided lunch for seniors twice a week (Mondays and Fridays), offered exercise classes twice a week and hosted a movie and a snack once per week. Once each week she also led a caregiver support group. She said many seniors are taking care of their elderly spouses.

“If seniors ever needed personal help I could help them with things like Social Security. We had a food pantry that they could utilize, anyone in the county could. The food pantry is still there if they need it.”

The Oberlin senior center “had almost 100 members but on a regular basis I would see the same 40 our so.” Clark defined “senior citizens,” or those who accessed her services as people as young as 55 or 60, but said the center had a couple people who were 50 as users.

The center closed in March 2020 as a result of the coroner virus pandemic.

“A few of them cried. They were all very disappointed,” Clark reported. They wanted it to stay open regardless of the pandemic. None of them were scared of it. It wasn’t my choice to close either. Once or twice a week I would call everybody to do wellness checks. I did deliver some supplies to them if they needed anything. And we have interns who are still making wellness check phone calls.”

Clark echoed community concerns about transportation “because transportation is a problem for people in Lorain County. Some of the people did carpool to get to the center, but other than coming to the center there was always a need for transportation still.

“I wish there were more services we could provide. I do live in Oberlin. I do know a lot of what seniors need. Transportation, financial assistance. When I became a social worker, seniors was my target population. A lot of them need help navigating Social Security. Getting help to them to get supplies and things. And since the center is closed they don’t really have some place to go to socialize.”

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Tony Wilgus

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

This week I talked with Tony Wilgus, retired professor, and currently someone who fosters neighborhood spirit on North Park Street.

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Sid Comings

Six or seven years after doing more than 50 oral history interviews, ohoberlin is being repurposed to serve as a public journal for my Spring 2021 internship toward my Public Administration degree at Lorain County Community College. Thanks to the Oberlin Recreation Department (for which I also sit on the city’s commission), I am interning with the purpose of finding out the social and recreational needs of seniors in the city for their purpose of identifying how the city might engage those needs.

This time, I interviewed my father who is the fourth generation of Comings to live in Oberlin. We talk about things ranging from the programs he has given to his remembrance of “Scottie, the barber” who used to take newspapers to the hospital each week.

There are more to come.

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