The Strides We’ve Made With Our Inclusive Healthy Communities Project
By Colleen Diskin
Our Community Begins at Home initiative is now in its 4th year, and we believe it’s helped raised awareness of the complex needs of people who are aging with one or more disabilities in our home community of Teaneck.
It’s also opened our own eyes to some barriers we hadn’t expected to encounter when we first set out on this project to identify the housing, community and systems barriers that make it hard for some older residents to safely and comfortably age in place.
“A goal of this project is to raise consciousness about the health and social challenges of residents aging with disabilities,” said Elizabeth Davis, executive director of The Bright Side Family. “The first lesson we learned was that many older residents who have aged into having a disability – such as vision loss, hearing loss and mobility loss – often don’t “self-identify” as having a disability.”
This taught us to be sensitive about not using language in our program brochures and outreach materials that some older adults might find stigmatizing. It also led us to realize that by resisting the “disability label,” many older residents with hearing, vision and mobility challenges also lacked awareness of benefits and resources
available to them, such as assistance paying for hearing aids or help getting a ramp or safety bars installed in their homes.
Likewise, there is often an information gap for people who’ve long had disabilities, but who have begun to face new challenges as they age.
“They too lack knowledge about the older adult programs and services that could assist them in aging-in-place and remaining active in the community,” Davis said.
Compounding these disconnects is the reality that many of the agencies and organizations that assist older adults and those that assist people with disabilities often don’t work in tandem with one another – creating what are in effect “separate silos” of information and services.
To remedy that, our Community Begins at Home last fall began hosting some get-to-know-you networking sessions for organizations in the region that serve both populations. We intend to follow that effort with the establishment of a group email listserv that aging-service and disability-service organizations can use to share information, seek assistance and make client referrals if needed.
“We hope to foster more partnerships and create a more holistic system for connecting people to the services they need to remain healthy, active and engaged in their communities,” Davis said.
Community Begins at Home is run in tandem with our Age-Friendly Teaneck community initiative, and the Township of Teaneck is an active partner in both efforts. The project is funded by a grant from the Inclusive Healthy Communities program of the New Jersey Division of Disability Services
Since its launch, we have worked to gather information about older residents with disabilities and their family caregivers through a survey, focus groups, home safety assessments, one-on-one visits, and referrals. We’ve hosted resource fairs and educational workshops and held presentations about this initiative to government groups and local faith organizations. We’ve also created new informational handouts and added a spotlight on disability resources in each of our monthly Age-Friendly Teaneck newsletters.
“Our primary goal is to learn as much as we could about the needs of those aging with disabilities and then communicate what we’ve learned to as many audiences as we can reach so that the community as a whole can better understand and begin to address these challenges,” Davis said.
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