NEW Gateway Membership option

CAMBRIDGE at HOME

Not Ready Yet?

CONSIDER A GATEWAY MEMBERSHIP

Not ready yet for a full service CAH membership? The Gateway Membership is a tax deductible, place holder membership option that will secure you a place with Cambridge at Home for the future as long as you renew it annually. You can convert this membership to the full service option at anytime within the membership year if your needs change. We will apply the balance of your Gateway fee to the charge for a full service membership.  Open to people aged 50-72 the Gateway Membership gives you peace of mind that help is just a phone call away when the unexpected happens. The CAH Board of Trustees have approved 50 Gateway Memberships.

Gateway members do not have access to services or special member programs like exercise, grocery shopping, transportation or volunteer rides. However you are invited to participate in CAH social and cultural activities at member prices to give you the opportunity to meet the members of our growing community of independent and active residents over 50 from Cambridge, Belmont, Arlington, Watertown and Somerville.  Consider a Gateway Membership for yourself, a parent, relative, neighbor or someone you care about today!

Single person household - $500 per year

Two person household -    $650 per year

For more information or an application please contact our office or download an application from our website.

617-844-1715

www.cambridgeathome.org

Fall 2013 Open House Information Sessions

Please come to an Open House this fall to learn more about Cambridge at Home. 

We Invite You to  Join Us !

Open House Information Sessions

o  September 18 - 11:00 am

o  October 22 - 1:00 pm

o  November 23 - 11:00 am

o  December 18 - 1:00 pm

Please call the office to reserve a space as seats are limited. Meetings will be held in our Cambridge office. If you can't make any of these dates we are happy to schedule an individual appointment for you with a staff member.

617-864-1715

545 Concord Avenue, Suite 104, Cambridge, MA 02138
www.cambridgeathome.org
info@cambridgeathome.org 

LEAH INGRAM, ‘A CREATIVE SOLUTION’

30 August 2013

A Creative Solution to Retirement Homes:

Virtual Retirement Communities Have Become A Reality in Cities Around the World

Brought to you by Liberty Mutual’s The Responsibility Project

One evening in 2006, Ruth Sullivan McElheny and husband Victor McElheny of Cambridge, Mass., hosted a dinner party. Soon conversation turned to retirement homes and what their guests thought of them. "Some people wanted to stay in their homes, others the husband wanted to stay and the wife wanted to go to a retirement home, or vice versa," recalls Ruth, now 77, a former corporate communications manager for Polaroid.

Ruth and Victor had visited a nearby retirement home the year before, but they weren't sure it was right for them. The couple felt it would be ideal if they could grow older together in their Cambridge home.

A few months later the Cambridge senior center brought in a speaker from a Boston organization that had created a virtual retirement community, allowing people to age in place. The McElhenys and about 150 others attended--including many of the people who had been at their dinner party.

There was such enthusiasm for this virtual retirement-home concept that the couple got together with a dozen of their friends and, in 2007, created Cambridge at Home. Despite its name, Cambridge at Home, which now has more than 200 members, is open to anyone over 50 who lives in Cambridge as well as nearby towns of Belmont, Arlington, Somerville and Watertown.

As it turns out, Cambridge at Home grew out of movement that began just across the Charles River in Boston. And Judy Willett, now the executive director of the Village-to-Village Network, was the speaker from that Cambridge event.

According to Willett, the idea for the first virtual retirement village originated when a couple in their 60s returned from a night out to discover water pouring through the roof of their home in the Beacon Hill section of Boston. The husband decided to tie a rope around his waist, hand the loose end to his wife and climb out of the second-story window to break up the ice dam that had formed on the roof and was causing the flood. As his wife held onto the rope for dear life, she imagined that there must be a better way to grow older in your own home.

Soon thereafter, the couple began polling their friends and neighbors to find out what they thought about the notion of creating their own virtual retirement community, one that provided the services of a traditional retirement home but that also allowed them to stay in the very same houses and apartments where they'd lived for years.

In 2002, they founded Beacon Hill Village. It became the harbinger of the virtual retirement community movement, offering its residents handyman assistance whenever they needed it, a ride-sharing system for trips to the dentist, doctor or dog groomer, and a social network for enjoying the cultural riches that Boston had to offer – all of this for an annual membership fee. Beacon Hill Village, which organized itself as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, hired Willett as executive director to run the day-to-day operations.

In 2006, The New York Times profiled Beacon Hill Village and its virtual retirement concept. Suddenly, Willett was answering thousands of phone calls from people around the world who wanted to know how they could replicate Beacon Hill Village.

Not long afterwards, with Beacon Hill Village's blessing, Willett created the Village-to-Village Network (VTV), which has become the go-to resource for information on virtual retirement communities. Currently, there are 115 virtual retirement villages--including three internationally (Australia, Canada and The Netherlands)--and 125 more in development. Most "villages" encompass a single town or a handful of neighborhoods in a certain location, such as the Lincoln Park Village in Chicago and the Athens Area Village in Georgia.

Demographics help to explain the growing popularity of virtual retirement villages. The latest census data shows 40 million Americans over age 65. "When you ask those age 60 and older about their future," says Willett, "ninety percent say they want to stay in their homes the rest of their lives, and [a village] is a wonderful, commonsense way to do that."

Victor McElheny, 77, concurs. "We've lived in our present home for 31 years. You've repaired it, you've renovated it, you've brought your children up there," he says. "You have a support system that existed before you were 65--your doctor, lawyer, and accountant are all relatively nearby. Everything is familiar."

Victor, a writer and former science journalist at MIT, also says that his generation "doesn't want to be a burden to family, and we don't want to be pushed around by relatives. You are looking for independence, and having your own home is enormously tied up in that."

Despite the fierce sense of independence, people who join a virtual retirement village understand that at some point they are going to need help or have to ask for it. That's why a ride somewhere and help with handyman services are the most popular requests that villages get from their members.

One of the first services that Irene Marcos used after joining Ashby Village in Berkeley, Calif. in 2010 was a ride. At age 69 she is a relatively young village resident. (The average age of village residents nationwide is 75, according to VTV.) "I'd had a dental procedure done, and I couldn't drive home or take public transit," recalls Marcos, a retired executive with the Levi-Strauss Company. "So a volunteer came and picked me up."

That ride was a free benefit of the dues that Marcos pays each year--$750 as a single; a couple pays $1,200. She also asked to have a handyman come by to change light bulbs. "I didn't think it was a good idea, at my age for me to be going up on a ladder," she explains.

Many village residents value the social aspect of membership. Part of the Cambridge at Home annual fee goes toward organizing outings for its members, from thrice-weekly fitness classes in Cambridge to private tours of museums and libraries in Boston.

For Marcos, being a part of Ashby Village allows her to continue participating in community service, something she has enjoyed her entire adult life. Currently, she chairs Ashby Village's volunteer committee. Marcos is responsible for recruiting, training and retaining volunteers. She also gets to flex her creative muscle as a volunteer herself, coming up with solutions to member requests.

"We have a member who sang in a chorus on Thursday evenings, but her husband had developed dementia and she couldn't leave him alone," Marcos recalls. In addition, the husband wanted to write his memoirs before it was too late, so Marcos needed to find someone who could spend time with the husband so the wife could go to chorus, but who could also help him write his life story. "We found a young woman, an attorney, who is one of our volunteers, and she was with him every Thursday evening and helped him write his memoirs while his wife went and sang her heart out. It was great to be able to put that together."

Since joining Ashby Village, Marcos has become closer to her Berkeley neighbors, something she couldn't do before as her job kept on the road nearly all the time. "I've made some really good new friends that I value tremendously," she adds. Plus, she never has to go up on a ladder again to change a light bulb.

Leah Ingram is the author of 14 non-fiction books, including "Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less." That book grew out of her popular frugal-living blog called Suddenly Frugal.

http://responsibility-project.libertymutual.com/articles/a-creative-solution-to-retirement-homes

 

 CAH at Members Travel to Tanglewood August 2013 with Beacon Hill Village

 

On a sunny Sunday, August 11, 13 members of Beacon Hill Village joined 15 members of Cambridge at Home on the second annual CAH bus trip to Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. As light breezes swept though the Festival shed and across lawns dotted with brightly colored umbrellas and balloons, they heard an all-Beethoven concert by the Boston Symphony, clad all in white and conducted by the renowned German pianist Christian Zacharias. The concert was dedicated to the enthusiastic Boston Symphony Orchestra Volunteers, who handed out programs, took tickets, and escorted expectant listeners to their seats. Zacharias led the orchestra off with a brisk rendition of the "Creatures of Prometheus" overture. Then, as soloist in the Second Piano Concerto, he unleashed a cascade of crystalline trills, projected by a canopy of triangular acoustical panels, that drew a standing ovation. After intermission, the concert closed with a sweeping performance of the "Pastoral" Symphony (Number 6), with its famous morning of birdsong, whispers of a brook, and brief storm. The audience greeted it with another prolonged ovation. The concert and the ambience of Tanglewood struck Patricia Pratt of Cambridge as "magisterial." On the ride out, over box lunches in the picnic shed, strolling the grounds with views of nearby hills, and on the way back to town, Beacon Hill Village and Cambridge at Home members conversed animatedly. As they neared home, having rolled smoothly through heavy Sunday evening traffic, they applauded the bus driver and spoke of continuing a tradition.

A Declaration of Independence for American Elders

A Declaration of Independence for American Elders

The average American arriving at the age of 65 can expect to live another 20 years. This is more than four years longer than just half a century ago. Will those 20 years be a sentence or a gift?  Will older Americans stand tall and live out their lives as they aspire to, or will their existence be overshadowed by the menace of illness? Will they be self-reliant, engaged, and useful, or will they spiral anxiously into being disregarded and pushed around and sunk in the sense of losing physical capabilities and friends and engagement with the world and its beauty?

Americans of all ages, sharing large but not limitless resources, must face such issues in a non-apocalyptic way. All must be aware of the inevitable challenges of growing older but also mindful of the immense benefit to the society that arises from a large group of people who have worked hard, who know a lot, who have gone beyond a narrow concentration on “me,” who are healthier and wealthier than older people used to be, and highly motivated to “give back,” not only to their own families but more generally to community and nation.

These are people who are determined not to be a burden, not to be cheated or abused, concerned to continue to get about freely, and to stay in the best possible physical and mental shape, building new friendships and intellectual and cultural interests, and running the innumerable details of their lives as smoothly as possible.

Living as they do in a highly individualistic society, older Americans have known that they must take the initiative and organize to achieve these aims, while enlisting the energy and ambition and focus of younger allies. They have begun building institutions, including a variety of residential communities that serve a few percent of Americans over 65. But the vast majority of more than 40 million elder Americans neither wish nor can afford to leave the homes they love. They strongly desire to remain embedded in the communities where they have worked, raised their families, entertained their friends, voted, paid taxes, and undertaken volunteer service. They want to live near their health care providers and a wealth of activities in multi-generational neighborhoods.

They know that they must maintain their homes, sustain a maximum level of physical activity, eat watchfully, and arrange for a vigorous social life in order to keep their independence and self-respect. To help them do this, they have not waited for government action or philanthropy.

To “Age in Community,” they have pulled themselves together in intensely local, non-profit Villages from coast to coast, which orchestrate comprehensive services to help them live in a serene, orderly, and efficient way. The Villages operate as friendly, businesslike management partners at the elbows of their members. And so, they also represent the best kind of good news to the worried relatives and other caregivers of older Americans.

In just a few years, the Villages have proven themselves effective, at a modest cost to their members. To be sure, potential expansions of their services may add somewhat to the fees. Most likely these extensions will include transportation and subsidized memberships, as well as intensified education for better health, financial management, and computer skills. But it has rapidly become clear that a small central Village office staff can provide a kind of “family office” that meets many practical and social needs.

Further, the Villages do more than fulfill the motto of “Quite Griping, Start Coping!” They represent a contribution by elders themselves to moderating the costs of an aging society. The Villages have built a national network to standardize best practices and begin the professionalization of their services. They have demonstrated that they represent a majority solution for American elders. They have broken through the paralysis of denial of the practical problems and opportunities of the process of growing older. 

Victor King McElheny,

President, Cambridge at Home

SAFETY FIRST.

SAFETY FIRST. Stacey Mann of the Tufts Health Plan Foundation periodically puts out tips for people over 65 in the Foundation's bulletin, Community Impact.

The June issue has an item on preventing falls at home, reporting work by the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts and Westbury Community Action in Rhode Island.

As people's depth perception declines, they have more trouble going down stairs safely and their risk of falling and breaking a hip goes up. Chief trouble spots are the top step and the bottom step, which need to be highlighted with paint or tape. Carroll Center has worked on this problem with 1,440 clients since 1985. Westbay also works on stair-visibility during home visits to people over 85 (Rhode Island has the nation's highest share of population over that age).

Besides visibility on staircases, the article mentions four other major actions to reduce the risk of failing at home: 1) sturdy rails on both sides of staircases, 2) non-slip backing for scatter rugs or getting rid of them entirely, 3) grab bars in the bathroom and no-slip mats in the bathtub, and 4) whacking away at clutter to create wider pathways.

Here's the link: http://www.imakenews.com/tuftsfoundation/e_article002728534.cfm

Getting Ready

17 June 2013

GETTING READY

Americans, young in spirit, hate to talk about growing old, let alone plan for how they are going to manage the inevitable. They are just beginning to hear about virtual retirement communities designed for managing the practicalities and the sociability of later stages of life. And people between 50 and 65 are just beginning to realize that people need to participate in such organizations as an essential part of preparing for retirement. They need to add their strength to the virtual retirement communities – now -- to make sure that the wide-ranging services of these “Villages” are available at the unpredictable moments when needs arise.

Sure, Americans spend decades preparing -- saving for retirement and buying health, disability, and long-term care insurance. But the prospect of declining physical capacity, of depending on others, of being brushed aside, shuts the thinking down just when it should keep going. We tend to have the same reaction as the balky three-year-old who doesn’t want to hold Mother’s hand crossing the street. We tend to ignore the fact that a 65-year-old American today is likely to live another 20 years.

Everybody on the threshold of retirement needs to reflect that autonomy, the self-reliance that enables a person to continue aspiring into old age, is a matter of anticipation, of foresight exercised every day – in advance of need. Living safely and confidently in the home you love, and getting out of that home for enjoyment and stimulation, both depend on organization. Serenity is based on order, for young and old alike. And order takes management, not only attending to your own to-do list but also reaching out for help from people you know and trust. As you always did, you have to plan, and you have to delegate. Virtual retirement communities are an important tool for this.

In a world where elderly people form a fast-growing proportion of humanity, self-help associations of neighbors are not just a private matter. Only so much of humanity’s money can go to people who depend in part on contributions from people who are still salaried. Older people have to seek as much efficiency as they can, not just to stretch their incomes but also to fulfill their aspirations to help younger people and the society generally. And the key to efficiency is organization, banding together with others in the same position, with the same hopes and needs – in advance of need.

An overwhelming portion of Americans over 65 want to live out their days at home, not in nursing homes, assisted living, or life care facilities. And only a minority of America’s elders are poor enough to qualify for municipal senior services. In the last decade, as people have faced the extent of the management challenge, virtual retirement communities like Cambridge at Home have begun springing up to meet huge needs. Nearly 100 are already operating and hundreds more are forming. These communities have proven that they can perform a growing range of tasks, connecting their members to tested, trusted suppliers of practical services as well as enjoyment. They now need a decisive accession of strength from people preparing for retirement.

Victor K. McElheny
President, Cambridge at Home

One-on-one Technology Assistance Sessions

CAH is excited to be offering members only one-on-one technology assistance sessions. They will be held in our Cambridge office between the hours of 10am and 2:30pm.

BeTechy, a group of Harvard Business School students, are offering personal 30-minute sessions to CAH members. They will be here to assist you with your laptops, iPads, iPods, smartphones, Kindles, basic e-mail and Microsoft Office functions. They are also equipped to aid you in the usage of social media sites including Facebook and Twitter, as well as Skype (so that you will be capable of communicating easily with long-distance family and friends!)

A non-refundable fee of $15 is required for each 30 minute session. Please call our office at 617-864-1715 to schedule and hold your meeting time. When doing so, be sure to let us know which device you would like assistance with, and/or the computer type (Mac or PC) if you are seeking computer support.

CAH Walking Group: Out and About!

The CAH walking group has been exploring the area together, while staying fit, for several years now. The group meets twice monthly, venturing on exciting walks through a variety of local sites and communities. These outings are led by Dick Joslin, one of CAH's most active volunteers. Dick recently led an invigorating walk through MIT's Cambridge campus, commentating along the way on his knowledge of the outdoor sculpture and impressive architecture. Other recent notable walks were the Boston holiday walk through many of downtown Boston's vibrant neighborhoods, as well as the group's most recent walk following Julia Child's footsteps in Cambridge. In honor of the famous chef's 100th birthday, the group began in Harvard Square, visited her home as well as other pertinent sites. The CAH walking group is an excellent way to stay healthy and active while enjoying local points of interest in the company of friends.

Siting Julia: Julia Child Centenary Exhibition

On Wednesday, February 20th, Cambridge at Home joined forces with Beacon Hill Village for a special visit to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard for "Siting Julia; Julia Child Centenary Exhibition." This exhibition traced Julia's path to becoming one of the most well-known chefs in the world, and documented her travels with husband Paul and their adventures and work in locations such as Paris, Germany, Norway, Cambridge, and the Maine Coast. Members participated in a discussion with Marylene Altieri, Curator of Books and Printed Materials, and then viewed the exhibition. This was followed by a lovely lunch at the Sheraton Commander's Nubar restaurant.

Marching Along with Time- Irving Berlin

On Sunday, February 24th, Cambridge at Home members attended a cabaret-style concert held at the Pickman Concert Hall, at the Longy School of Music. It was part of the American Classics presentation of concerts highlighting The Great American Songbook. This concert, entitled "Marching Along with Time," by Irving Berlin, was performed by The Smart Set- consisting of Valerie Anastasio, Tim Harbold, Bradford Connor, and Benjamin Sears (who recently authored a biography of Irving Berlin).

Your Peace of Mind; Legal & Financial Talk

On Tuesday, January 15th, a packed room of CAH members congregated for a discussion centering around the financial issues concerning seniors. Presenter David Keefe III,  Estate and Financial Planning Adviser for Eagle Strategies, LLC discussed relevant financial issues to the senior population.  Since 1992, David has dedicated himself to comprehensive financial planning, with a focus on retirement and estate planning, as well as asset management. David was able to offer great insight and detail regarding financial concerns, while presenter Rebecca J. Benson discussed pertinent legal issues including how to protect ones health care wishes and estate in the case of incapacitation or death.  Rebecca is Of Counsel to Margolis & Bloom, LLP, and has exclusively worked on estate planning, Medicaid eligibility, planning for beneficiaries with special needs, and advocating for nursing home and assisted living residents. A good portion of time was set aside for CAH members to ask a wide array of questions, offering comprehensive information for members to take with them, moving into the new year.

From Austen to Zola; Harvard's Houghton Library

On Thursday, January 10th, CAH members embarked on a tour of the Amy Lowell Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library, led by curator and Modern Books & Manuscripts and exhibition organizer, Leslie Morris.  Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a controversial and outspoken Pulitzer Prize poet who over the span of her life, amassed a collection of 18th-20th century works by prominent creative minds such as Jane Austen, William Blake, Charlotte Bronte, William Blake, Walt Whitman & Emile Zola. In this special fall exhibition, entitled "From Austen to Zola; Amy Lowell as a Collector", CAH members were able to enjoy this impressive collection.