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Seniors Count Partnership

Address
		care of Easter Seals
		555 Auburn Street
		Manchester, New Hampshire
		03103
Web site
		www.seniorscountnh.org
Contact
		Arlene Kershaw
		603.621.3558

The Seniors Count Partnership is a convener and catalyst for community based outreach and action – to redefine and ensure independence for older people, and in doing so, create a better life for all. This Partnership works to ensure that each older adult receives the help that he or she needs to maintain his or her independence, and to safely live out their lives with dignity and in the manner they choose. The coalition of partners is highly participatory and inclusive, involving representatives from public sector agencies, nonprofit senior service provider agencies, elected officials, local businesses, and seniors and their caregivers. The partnership’s goals are to: raise awareness of the problems facing seniors; leverage services to eliminate gaps and increase choice and access; and increase financial and human resources to assist seniors.

Successes:

Partnered with the Manchester Regional Committee on Aging to develop the Aging Sensitivity Curriculum, now taught to almost 3000 students at two local high schools. New Hampshire Public TV, a member of the Partnership, then made it available through its educational “knowledge network” to increase the availability of the curriculum across the area.
With the Partnership as a catalyst, the Dartmouth Medical School continuing education series for physicians focused entirely on aging in 2007, with the theme “The New Thinking About Aging: Fostering Health – Coping with Frailty.” The seventh and final session of the series was delivered by the Seniors Count Partnership on “Seniors Count: Imagine a Senior Friendly Community.”
During the Partnership’s twice-yearly Seasonal Clean-up events, more than 400 volunteers from schools, businesses, the Red Cross and youth groups performed home maintenance chores for over 300 seniors. The Partnership’s Home Maintenance committee created a safety checklist for seniors and their families then matched them with volunteer “handy people” who completed needed repairs.
Through the Partnership’s “Adopt-a-Senior” project, students from St. Anselm’s College were recruited and matched with frail seniors.

Real Life Impact:

“I don’t need a pill. I just need some help!” Seventy year old Ernie is a proud veteran who lives in the Manchester home he has owned for more than 50 years. Because of limited income and frailty, plus multiple medical problems, much needed repairs to his home and yard had been neglected. When he voiced his growing concerns about his inability to maintain his home, his doctor wanted to treat him for anxiety and depression with medication. Ernie refused, stating he did not need more medicine, just a helping hand! And help he received, through the Seniors Count Partnership during a spring clean-up project. The Partnership coordinated a team of high school students who helped to stain his deck, put up a fence, weatherproof his foundation and paint his living room ceiling. A Flexible Spending Fund created by the Partnership purchased a new front door for him to replace one warped by flooding. Ernie is one of hundreds helped by the Seniors Count Home Maintenance initiative, which has created a collaborative mechanism by which groups come together to address recurring home maintenance needs of elderly home owners.

We encourage the reproduction of this material and ask that you credit Community Partnerships for Older Adults Community Partnerships for Older Adults is a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation within the University of Southern Maine
© 2007 Community Partnerships for Older Adults

Strategic Planning - Strategic planning will help you create a bold vision for the future, strengthen new partnerships, forge creative and innovative linkages between stakeholders, and ultimately better address the needs of older adults in your community. A community-wide strategic planning process will benefit from the wisdom of a diverse array of participants and ensure greater likelihood of success.

Inclusion & Diversity - Including older adults and caregivers is crucial to growing and sustaining successful community partnerships. It is especially important to seek participation from traditionally excluded groups such as those defined by race and ethnicity, low income, lack of English language proficiency, and sexual orientation. While many factors can challenge a partnership’s efforts to embrace diversity and build productive relationships, receiving input from a broad array of community members helps to ensure equality in decision making and leads to long term care and supportive services that are more responsive to a community’s diverse needs.

Fiscal Strategies - Developing a fiscal strategy is an important and challenging part of improving the system of long term care and supportive services for older adults in your community. The array of funding options requires that community partnerships be strategic in their aims. This area of the Resource Center reviews relevant funding sources and provides resources to help you make the most of them.

Communications - Have you ever thought about how many times a day someone tries to influence you to think a certain way, to buy a certain product, to support a cause or to change your behavior? These days there are so many ways to reach you—from cell phones and Palm Pilots to instant messaging, cable TV and customized publications—that a reasonable reaction is to simply tune everything out. It’s a world of sound and fury.

Evaluation - While the success of a community partnership may seem self-evident, a systematic evaluation holds members to a higher standard, revealing more than what we see with the naked eye. This section offers an introduction to evaluation. It covers the basic principles of evaluation design and implementation, as well as some topics likely to be important for community partnerships working to improve long term care and supportive services.

Partnership Evolution - A partnership generally consists of multiple organizations and individuals working together under a common vision. Who will be in the partnership varies from community to community, yet the purpose is universal: to create a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to sustain results that are not possible alone.