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Coming to you live from Providence, Rhode Island!
I am writing this letter whilst attending the National Adult Day Services Association conference with our Program Director (recently promoted!), Nerely, and Lead Program Specialist/Volunteer Coordinator, Mary. We are thrilled to be here learning about ways to further improve and expand FC’s programs and services, but do forgive any lack of cohesion in this letter, as traveling to Providence took us more plane time than my trips to and from school in Australia. Four legs of flight, a cross-state-lines Uber, and we are here!
I’ve been fortunate to attend many conferences and educational gatherings over the years and always come home with new information that I then get to translate into practice for our unique bubble that is Santa Barbara. That’s one of the reasons I value traveling to learn from people doing this work all over the country. I get to hear what is working elsewhere, bring those ideas home, and then ask what they could look like here. But I’ve also become very aware of how often those of us on the Central Coast have to leave our region to access broader educational opportunities in aging and dementia care. We have incredible professionals, organizations, caregivers, and resources here, but there aren’t many opportunities to bring all of those people together with national experts to ask some pretty basic but important questions:
What is going on in dementia care right now, what are we learning, and what can we actually do with that information?
As you have probably gathered from the interviews, articles, emails, social media posts, and my generally incessant yapping, Friendship Center’s 50th anniversary is a celebration of which we are very proud. We’ve found lots of ways to celebrate this year, but one that I’m particularly proud of is using this milestone to bring some of that education to our community.
On September 26, we’re hosting Friendship Center’s first Dementia Care Conference right here in Santa Barbara. We’ve invited experts from near and far, professionals across disciplines, caregivers, advocates, and community members to spend a day learning together, not around one company, one product, or one way of doing things, but around a shared desire to understand dementia better and care for people better. And I really do mean community members. This is not a conference where you need a string of letters after your name to belong; all will have a place at the table (we even have special pricing for current caregivers and students).
Maybe Alzheimer’s runs in your family and you’ve quietly wondered,
Does that mean I’m probably going to get it too?
Maybe you’re helping manage a loved one’s medications and thinking,
Wait…can I give her the same over-the-counter sleep aid I would take myself?
Maybe you’ve heard about all these new Alzheimer’s drugs in the news and have absolutely no idea what they actually do, who qualifies for them, how much they cost, or whether they’re as big of a deal as they sound. Or maybe you simply want to understand why someone living with dementia can communicate or behave so differently from one moment or environment to the next, and what we actually know today about protecting our own brains as we age.
These are the kinds of questions I want people in our community to have a place to ask, and our speakers are tackling them from all sorts of angles. Dr. Hedva Levy will help us make sense of medications and medication safety as we age, and we also have the hosts of the Remember Me Podcast coming to Santa Barbara (this is a big deal!). Their conversations about dementia, caregiving, the sandwich generation, grief, and life after loss are honest, funny, heartbreaking, and human, and I’m so excited for our community to experience them in person.
There are some very sweet full-circle moments tucked into the speaker lineup, too. Former Friendship Center team member Hope Saxon-Meyers is coming back, now as a geriatric nurse practitioner and one of our conference speakers. Someone who once spent her days directly caring for our members has continued growing in this field and, years later, is coming home to share what she’s learned with the community that helped shape her.
Which brings me to Sunday…
The day after the conference, we’re having our Friendship Center Family Reunion, and if you’re reading this newsletter, there is a very good chance I’m talking directly to you when I say: please come!
I run into former Friendship Center families around town all the time at Arnoldi’s, Trader Joe’s, a doctor’s office, or somewhere equally fabulous. We do that thing where we look at each other for a second because we both know we know each other but it might, understandably, take you a moment to place me because I’ve had a lot of different hairstyles over the last nine years at FC. I’ll wait for the subtle ‘go ahead’ and come barreling over for a hug, and suddenly we’re catching up on years of life.
I get to hear about you and what life looks like now, including, for many of you, what life after caregiving has become. You get to ask me which staff members are still here, how Carol Ann Manzi’s music class is going (wonderfully, of course), what Friendship Center is up to now, and whether so-and-so still does that one thing you remember. And, importantly, we get to talk about your person, our friend.
Or maybe we never overlapped at FC, but the moment you hear where I work, your face lights up and you tell me about your sweet grandfather who attended Friendship Center many years ago. Suddenly, memories start flooding back about this person who was very special to you and had a full, meaningful life. I love these encounters just as much. Please tell me about him. I always want to hear!
I’ve written in these letters before about losing people I love, and one of the stranger parts of grief is realizing that, as time passes, there are fewer natural opportunities to randomly bring them up. The people around you now may never have known them, and the circumstances that once made their name part of your everyday conversation have changed. But that certainly doesn’t mean you’ve stopped wanting to talk about them.
Come share the stories you love repeating. Tell an old staff member something you remember from that season of your life. Laugh about the thing your mom used to do that was absolutely not funny at the time but is hilarious now. Tell us what you’ve been doing since we last saw you. Have some food, eat some ice cream, look at old pictures, cry if you feel like crying, laugh if you feel like laughing, and hug the people who shared some piece of that chapter with you.
Or don’t do any of that! Come grab some ice cream, wander around, look at familiar faces, feel that little tap on your shoulder when someone recognizes you, and simply spend some time in a place where you don’t have to explain why Friendship Center mattered to your family. That’s what I want this reunion to feel like.
Our 50th anniversary gives us a wonderful excuse to celebrate Friendship Center, but when I think about what Friendship Center actually is, I don’t think first about the building, the programs, the vans, or even fifty years’ worth of accomplishments. I think about people. The thousands of people who have passed through this place, learned something here, taught us something, cared for someone, been cared for, formed a friendship, shared a laugh, grieved a loss, or left some little piece of themselves behind.
Whether you’re coming to learn with us on Saturday, coming home to us on Sunday, or, my preference, doing both, I really hope I’ll see you there.
With love from Lil Rhody* and back many times around,
Kathryn Westland , MPH
Executive Director
*this is what locals call Rhode Island 🙂 |
