Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Aging in Place in Cohousing

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Annie, great resources - I'm passing them on to our community.

On 3/24/06, Annie Russell <annie [at] whdc.com> wrote:
>
> Silver Sage Village is an age targeted community for proactive adults
> that Wonderland Hill Development Company is building in Boulder
> Colorado.  <snip>

We plan to use a process similar to the Care Conference
> described by Craig at Songaia.  We discovered a book called Share the
> Care: How to Organize a Group to Care for Someone Who is Seriously Ill,
> that we found very helpful.  It describes in detail how to create a
> "caring circle" for someone.  By having a system like this it makes it
> possible for either a community member, family member, or friend to be
> the care coordinator, whoever is most appropriate.  And it doesn't limit
> the helpers to just community members.


So far, care coordinators at Songaia have been community members, but we
have usually had other friends and/or family be helpers.

Another learning re: Care Conferences is that the first time we held one, a
medical social worker (a former member) helped us a LOT. In particular, he
helpfully encouraged us to become quite specific about how to actually
handle details, what would be scheduled, what would be left on-call, etc.
Without his support, we would have left things more comfortably ambiguous.
We actually had him come back to help us a second time, and now do them on
our own.

We are openly discussing all these issues among ourselves at our
> community meetings and on retreats and creatively looking for solutions
> that address the needs we know will emerge as we age.
>

Is Silver Sage looking at cost-sharing for paid care? A live-in nurse? With
16 cooperating senior households, it would seem to have the scale to create
some interesting models.