abhow words sharing our stories - sitemasonabhow wordssharing our stories july 2011 3 the separation...

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Mary Balsley had just stepped into a local elementary school class to read a Dr. Seuss book when she realized

she had entered a world much different from her own at Plymouth Village in Redlands, Calif.

All the faces in the audience were painted with Cat-in-the-Hat whiskers.

“Well, I can’t read in this room,” she announced to the surprised young-sters at Highland Grove Elementary School. “I don’t have any whiskers.”

Closing the Generation Gap

Plymouth Village’s intergenerational choir includes, clockwise from top left: Vera Peery, Helen Holliday, Ed Irvin, Hayden Lopez, Maddie Montano and Gracee Esquivel. Bobbi Cummings is choir director.

VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 7 • JULY 2011

Page 5 ABHOW Welcomes Bay Area Communities

Page 7 Valle Verde Sisters Are Dually Devoted

Page 9 Thrift Store is Valle Verde’s ‘Little Gem’

ABHOW WordsSharing Our Stories

ABHOW WordsSharing Our Stories JULY 2011 2

To the children’s delight, the teacher promptly painted whiskers on their visitor’s face.

“They were just hilarious,” Balsley, president of the resident association at Plymouth Village, recalls of the stu-dents’ reaction. “You try to get at their level and have fun.”

Schoolchildren and seniors live on opposite ends of the aging spectrum. But at ABHOW’s senior living communities, the ends are coming together with re-markable benefits for the young and the young at heart.

Intergenerational programs are closing the aging gap, an all-too-common distance in modern society that leaves children without a connection to their grandpar-ents’ generation and deprives seniors of the chance to share their life experience and pass on their stories.

Jeff Glaze, chief operations manager for ABHOW’s continuing care retirement communities, says the company is keen on intergenerational programs be-cause they so clearly help residents age successfully.

“Our goal is to make sure our residents maintain meaning and purpose in their lives, and one of the best ways to do that is to provide them with opportunities to connect with younger generations,” says Glaze.

At ABHOW’s 11 CCRCs, generations come together in a number of ways, from pen pal programs to musi-cal collaborations to civic volunteer projects. Seniors at one community even invited a local youth group to introduce them to high-tech robotics.

The company’s affordable housing communities are getting in on the action, too, often by hosting local school and civic group meetings. Residents at Tahoe Senior Plaza in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., have become patrons of sorts to a local girls’ karate club.

Closing the Generation Gap Continued from cover

At the CCRCs, intergenerational programs are a complement to Masterpiece Living, an initiative for successful aging that focuses on the four dimensions of a well-balanced life – social, physical, intellectual and spiritual. A happy encounter with children can touch all four at once.

Vera Peery, a resident member of Plymouth Village’s intergenerational choir, says the programs have a posi-tive effect.

“Getting involved with the children is a wonderful thing,” she says. “In a way, it keeps us young.”

Peery says the choir is a chance to keep singing, some-thing she’s loved to do since she was about the age of the Highland Grove youngsters who sing alongside her.

“I’m 85 and I’m still able to warble a little bit,” she says.

Maddie Montano, a rising fifth-grader and choir member, says for her, the talent of the resident singers was a revelation.

“I was really surprised because I didn’t know that they could sing really well,” she says. “They are really good.”

One of the choir’s favorite songs to perform is, per-haps fittingly, the “Peter Pan” tune “I Won’t Grow Up.”

The need for this togetherness, aging experts agree, stems from changes in modern-day lifestyles. Daily inter-action between generations was common when extended families lived together or close by in towns and villages. But the link largely dissolved as improved transportation and communications created a more mobile population. Today, grandparents and grandchildren are often sepa-rated by great distance. The divide deepens when seniors move into communities reserved for retirees.

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The separation of children and seniors is costly. Children go without the wisdom and gentleness of their elders, and seniors miss the curiosity and affec-tion of the young.

It need not be that way, according to Glaze. Intergenerational programs can’t close the gap between family generations, he says, but they can bridge stages of life. Better still, they can help keep seniors from feeling as if society no longer values them.

“We’re very intentional at ABHOW about creating opportuni-ties for them to share their stories, and successful aging means you keep growing and learning new things as you age,” he says. “Our resi-dents receive as much from the kids, I’m sure, as the kids do from them.”

Intergenerational programs have one goal in common – to connect – but a growing variety of ways to do it. Allowing each community to capitalize on its own strengths and creativity in developing these pro-grams, ABHOW believes, is far better for residents than a corporate, cookie-cutter approach would be.

“It’s amazing what you see bubble up at each com-munity if, as a company, you say, ‘Here’s the goal, now go do it in a way that makes sense for you,’” says Glaze. “We leave it to our team members to meet corporate objectives in a way that creates uniqueness at each community.”

The creativity and ingenuity of ABHOW’s intergen-erational programs often draw the attention of others in the senior living industry.

“It’s flattering when others begin looking at what you’re doing,” says Cathy Jensen, director of resident activities and lifestyle at The Terraces at Los Altos in

Los Altos, Calif. “That’s probably when you know you are on to something.”

One of the more innovative things Jensen has done at the community is to have local teens come in and speak to groups of residents as a way to fulfill their public speaking requirements for high school. And

Closing the Generation Gap Continued from page 2

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Plymouth Village’s Ed Irvin provides accompaniment to Gracee Esquivel, a fifth-grader at Highland Grove Elementary School in Redlands, Calif.


recently, Jensen worked with Stanford University students to record the life stories of women residents for an oral history project.

Other examples abound. At Grand Lake Gardens in Oakland, Calif., a Baptist youth group plays board games with residents, and the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra comes in regularly to play clas-sical music. At Piedmont Gardens, also in Oakland, residents meet with students of all ages from various schools for parties, events, classes, workshops, and holiday celebrations. At Mount Rubidoux Manor, an affordable senior housing community in Riverside, Calif., seniors work with local schoolchildren to raise awareness about environmental issues.

How seniors and children benefit from such contact is as obvious as a smile, says Jensen. She remembers the comments of two third grade girls as she took them to meet the seniors with whom they had corresponded in a pen pal program.

“The girls said, ‘This is the most exciting day of my life.’ I almost had to stop and ask, ‘What did you say?,’” Jensen recalls.

Plymouth Village is especially enterprising, per-haps due to the community’s unusual generational connection in leadership.

Julie Michaels’ father was a former executive director at Plymouth Village. She later held the same post before leaving to raise her young family. Later, she returned to work as a reading teacher at Highland Grove Elementary School. Her mother

Closing the Generation Gap Continued from page 3

is Mary Balsley, who read the Dr. Seuss stories. All those connections have led to an unusually strong link between the community and the school.

Intergenerational programs are more than an activ-ity, Michaels says. At her school, where more than half the students qualify for a free or reduced lunch and many are studying English as a second language, Michaels says a visit from a resident can mean a lot.

“I watch and oftentimes it’s those children who gravitate over to the residents,” says Michaels. “They need that hug and just to know they are cared for.”

At times, the connection between seniors and children at the school can be profound, particularly in special needs classes. Some of the residents use wheel-chairs and walkers. So do some of the children.

Peery remembers going to read to one of the classes.

“I just thought, how am I going to get across to these children? I was so taken aback when I saw them. Some couldn’t speak. Some couldn’t see. But they all could hear,” she says.

So Peery read to them across the generations and across so much else.

“I was absolutely blown away by the response that I got,” she says. “The smiles, the clapping, the laughter was just very special. I hope I was able to bring a little bit of change into their life. I’m looking forward to go-ing back. It really touched me.”


ABHOW Welcomes Bay Area CommunitiesEven before they officially joined

the ABHOW family, San Rafael Rotary Manor and Pleasanton Gardens looked and felt a lot like ABHOW communities.

Soundly managed, well maintained and rated highly both by residents and regulatory agencies, the Bay Area affordable housing communities are as excited to now be part of ABHOW as ABHOW is to have them.

ABHOW assumed management of San Rafael Rotary Manor, a 99-apartment community in San Rafael, in February, and of Pleasanton Gardens, a 40-apart-ment community in Pleasanton, in June. Both communities have a fairly lengthy wait list for new residents.

Tim Hunt, president of Pleasanton Gardens’ board of di-rectors, said choosing ABHOW to manage the community – the last stand-alone property of its kind in the state – felt right for a lot of reasons.

“When we decided it was time to bring on corporate management, we went to three [nonprofit providers of afford-able senior housing] that we felt pretty good about in terms of their reputation and experience,” Hunt says. “But it was ABHOW that really raised the bar. The

board’s mission and vision for the community lined up very well with ABHOW’s.”

Ancel Romero, ABHOW’s senior vice president for affordable housing, said the company was not about to let an opportunity to manage such a sterling commu-nity pass by, especially given that Pleasanton Gardens is located in ABHOW’s corporate backyard, so to speak.

“The residents of Pleasanton Gardens have long been our neighbors, the board members our civic partners, and now they’re part of the ABHOW family,” says Romero. “We are thrilled with how it turned out for everyone involved.”

Just a 20-minute drive from the Golden Gate Bridge, San Rafael Rotary Manor is an impeccable se-nior community owned by Marin County’s oldest and

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Located just around the corner from ABHOW’s corporate office in Pleasanton, Calif., Pleasanton Gardens is a small, cottage-style community with beautiful grounds and an interesting history.


most established Rotary Club. The community’s 30-year history of resident engagement, volunteerism and civic involvement is owed to its Rotary connection.

“San Rafael Rotary Manor is a really beautiful com-munity nestled among the trees in the highly desir-able Sun Valley area of San Rafael,” notes ABHOW’s Linda Coleman, who as regional property supervisor oversees management of the community and its three-member team. “The residents take a lot of pride in the community and you’ll often see them out gardening and working in the raised flower and vegetable beds.”

Administrator Linda Perkins says the community is also unique in that a local public health nurse visits twice monthly and offers free blood pressure checks for residents, in addition to health and wellness screenings.

“That’s a great service and one that I would love to see at other ABHOW communities in some form or fashion,” Coleman says.

For now, with community funds, ABHOW has started making improvements both to the interior and exterior of San Rafael Rotary Manor, including transi-tioning one of the apartments into a computer lab and bistro. Renovations are likely at Pleasanton Gardens, too.

On the eve of his retirement, Bruce Fiedler, Pleasanton Gardens’ longtime administrator, took a moment to reflect on the community’s 42-year his-tory of pioneering leadership and service – much like ABHOW’s own, in fact.

With a mixture of pride and poignancy, Fiedler says, “We were the first HUD-affiliated senior community to be located outside of a big city in California, and we were the last self-managed, small community in the state.

“We were created by four local congregations at a time when churches only talked about such coopera-tion. But what I am most proud of is the fact that mem-bers of our community were instrumental in the 1992 ordinance that led to smoke-free restaurants, first lo-cally, then across California and later, everywhere else.”

ABHOW Welcomes Bay Area Affordable Housing Communities Continued from page 5

According to community board president Bob Marcucci, San Rafael Rotary Manor got its start when local Rotarians recognized the need for quality homes for area seniors with limited incomes.


Valle Verde Sisters Are Dually DevotedMarian and Helen Chuan

look alike, talk alike, even work alike.

But at Valle Verde, where the twins have shared an apartment since 1999, it isn’t how they are alike that makes an im-pact on their Santa Barbara, Calif., com-munity – it’s how they are different.

The sisters give new meaning to the idea of volunteerism – Marian with resi-dents in the community’s health center in her role as coordinator of the Best Friends program, and Helen with gardening, floral arranging and landscaping projects.

First, we have to ask – identical or fraternal?

Marian: Helen and I are identical twins. We con-stantly confuse people, and that’s kind of fun, that we still can after all these years. Our friends can tell us apart. We are different, but we’re alike in some ways, too.

You’re retired. Why work so hard volunteering at this stage of life?

Marian: It’s because of our parents, really. Our father was a banker. He and our mother came here to the United States from China over 100 years ago for college. They really appreciated their life in this coun-try and the education they received. They wanted to give something back.

Helen: All their lives, our parents gave their time and their energy to others. We were taught to do the same. My father was a philanthropist, but he taught us the

greatest thing you can give is your time. When someone asks about our legacy, this is what I think of. Time.

Marian: And that is what people sometimes don’t understand about spending time with residents in the health center. They might be in the last stage of life, but the time they have left is precious. Every moment you spend with them is a chance to bring them comfort and happiness.

How would you sum up your life at Valle Verde?

Helen: Marian and I are very happy here at Valle Verde. And I think people are happy with us, too. Our interests affect many people. The way I see it is, Marian works with people who need help and I enjoy people who enjoy gardens. Together we lift people’s spirits and give them pleasure.

The Chuan sisters – Marian, left, and Helen – are well known around Valle Verde. The sisters often put in the equivalent of a full-time work week caring for their fel-low residents and the community.

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Thrift Store is Valle Verde’s ‘Little Gem’Wednesday mornings are

for watching clocks at ABHOW’s Valle Verde.

Just before 10 a.m., residents and team members alike spring into action at the Santa Barbara, Calif., community, and hurriedly make their way to La Tienda. Maybe they’ve had their eye on something special at the campus thrift store, or maybe this time

they’re just browsing. Either way, there’s a good chance they’ll find something wonderful – if they hurry.

“It’s exciting. You can’t wait to get over there and see what’s new since last time,” says Cindy Johnson, an account specialist in Valle Verde’s finance office. “I’ve found so many little treasures over the years. And that’s kind of what La Tienda is, our little gem.”

For more than 30 years, La Tienda has satisfied the community’s need for a little retail therapy by selling

furniture, clothes and home decor. People come from around Santa Barbara to shop there, and though the volunteer-run store accepts donations from all over, most of the gently used goods come from the residents themselves.

“A lot of people, when they come to a retirement community, bring too much stuff,” says Dorothy Burkhart, store manager for four of the nine years she’s lived at Valle Verde. “If we have a lot of stuff, we make

a lot of money.”

The store takes in about $600 in a typical week, but receipts can easily double that amount, Burkhart says. In fact, La Tienda sold about $1,400 in goods dur-ing the second week of June. The best part is that nearly every cent benefits Valle Verde residents.

La Tienda has raised nearly $800,000 since its opening in 1980. The money has been used to purchase a new van for resident excursions, resurface

an outdoor barbecue, and renovate the beauty parlor, among other things. Residents are encouraged to pro-pose new projects that might be funded by La Tienda.

The store doesn’t advertise because it doesn’t need to. To say business is brisk is an understatement. It’s hard to get in the door on some Wednesdays, the only day of the week the store is open.

“We have regulars and thrift store junkies,” Burkhart says. “And one of the really nice things is a lot of our

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With limited shelf space and a robust clientele, La Tienda’s merchandise is often displayed outside – which is just fine with loyal shoppers.


Marian: She brings the environment to people; I provide the caring. With both of us it comes from the heart.

You both bring joy to a lot of people. What brings you the greatest joy?

Helen: When I moved here to Valle Verde, I noticed the rose garden needed drastic assistance. I asked for help restoring it and now, well, you wouldn’t believe the difference. We have 20 volunteers who work with me. Every other year we host our community rose garden party and people come from all over to attend that. The cutting garden is where we plant flowers that we later cut and take to the health center for the

residents, and also where we get the flowers for all the arrangements we use to decorate the community. It’s a lot of work, but to hear residents say, ‘You made my day,’ makes me feel wonderful.

Marian: We are very much interested in the well-being of the residents in the community. That is, again, how we are alike. I want people to be comfort-able and secure and to feel like life is worth living, even at old age.

Helen: We know about the anxiety people face in getting older. Like my mother said, it’s no fun getting old. But every day you can find something new, some-thing beautiful, if you look.

Valle Verde Sisters Are Dually Devoted Continued from page 7

Thrift Store is Valle Verde’s ‘Little Gem’ Continued from page 8

residents can’t get out to shop, so they just buy all their furniture and clothes from us.”

For all the community improvements the store makes possible, everyone agrees its greatest good is in

the social and sentimental bonds it helps forge between people.

Burkhart says she’s made friends, “from all over the city,” thanks to her association with the store. And for team mem-bers like Cindy Johnson and others who’ve purchased estate items at La Tienda, the oppor-tunity to take home something that once belonged to a cherished friend and resident is priceless.

“I have a desk at home that belonged to a long-time resident who passed away, someone who was very special,” Johnson says. “When I see it, I always think of her.”

Shoppers peruse La Tienda’s gently used merchandise, much of which is donated by Valle Verde residents and family members.


Budget Process Under Way at ABHOWThe budgeting process is officially

under way at ABHOW, both at the corporate and community level. ABHOW’s fiscal year starts October 1.

At the CCRCs, each community is encouraged to have a Budget Committee made up of team members, residents and board members. Based on local input and working within established targets and goals, the com-mittee reviews its local priorities. The annual Resident Opinion Survey is helpful in identifying areas of focus, and community sales and marketing teams give input.

Local proposed budgets are presented in July, fine-tuned and consolidated, and presented to senior management and the ABHOW Board of Directors in August. Once the local budgets are adopted, executive directors share this news with their communities in September or October.

“The budgeting process is, of course, essential to running this business. But it’s also a way for the com-munities and the company as a whole to determine what’s important to us, what our goals are, and how we intend to get there,” says Jeff Glaze, senior vice presi-dent and chief operations manager.

ABHOW, National and State Websites: ABHOW: abhow.com LeadingAge: leadingage.org Aging Services of Arizona: agingservicesofaz.orgAging Services of California: aging.orgAging Services of Washington: agingwa.org

“American Baptist Homes of the West, as an expression of Christian mission, seeks to enhance the independence, well-being

and security of older people through the provision of housing, health care and supportive services.”

Published by the Strategic Planning and Communications Department Kay Kallander, Senior Vice President e-mail [email protected]

6120 Stoneridge Mall Rd. 3rd Floor Pleasanton, CA 94588 phone: 1-925-924-7150 toll-free: 1-800-222-2469 fax: 1-925-924-7232

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at abhow.com

Martha Miles, right, a resident of The Grove at Plymouth Village, gets a little help from team member Mari Jenkins in releasing about 1,500 ladybugs during a special cere-mony at the Redlands, Calif., community on June 24. This marks the second year that Grove residents have released ladybugs into the community garden, both to help control aphids and, well, just because it’s fun.

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