What an amazing day filled with ideas and great discussion among a bunch of talented people!
Today, we hosted our Community Life Coordinator’s and the Director’s of Resident Services from our communities. Quite honestly, we hadn’t had a meeting in awhile and it was time to get the group back together to share ideas and thoughts about the future of activity programs in senior living communities.
Our day started with what the future holds in activities, and how to adapt programs going forward as our population changes. No longer is the senior living community about games and entertainment – in fact, it hasn’t been for quite some time. Senior living communities are moving in to an era of continued education, life long learning such as painting classes or card making, and continued participation in local events and groups to name a few. It was really fantastic to hear all of the ideas being shared today that will make community life that much stronger.
As lunch came and went, we began a discussion about the importance of fitness and wellness in older adults. We’ve found that the more active a resident has been in the fitness programs, they get stronger, tend to fall less, and tend to get sick less often. To give an idea of the importance of the program, a person from the group shared a story of one of our residents who initially had to use a walker while moving about. After participating in the program over the past few months, she has been able to shed the assistance of a walker and is now striving to do more and more things on her own; We heard of a resident who was able to lower her medications after participating in a walking program; We also heard from our Director of Operations, Roman Bloemke who has gone through his own transformation during the past 6 months by losing 50 pounds so far. As we moved through the discussion about the importance of fitness and wellness programs, it became clear that the future of these types of programs in our communities is only going to get better!
Volunteers play such a vital role in for us. They do a lot in assisting with group activities to one-on-one interactions to leading educational topics. We would be remiss if we didn’t send out a very large thank you to all of those individuals who are donating their time. Our team couldn’t talk enough about what you do in the communities on a daily basis. You rock!
As we ended the day, we talked about upcoming events, including our award winning program, Dreams Can Come True.
From Dreams Can Come True, to fitness and wellness programs, to improving day to day life, our team is focused on truly changing lives. What a talented and exciting group of people to be around!
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