Helping over 30,000 local elders of all faiths thrive through award-winning programs that include adult day care, transportation, employment, technology training, information, outreach and diverse intergenerational services.
Why do we exist?
JCA -- the Jewish Council for the Aging of Greater Washington -- represents something different to each and every man and woman we proudly serve. To the isolated senior with no means of getting around town, we are the smiling ElderBus driver who cheerfully helps with canes, walkers and wheelchairs and even carries packages with a smile. To the concerned family member suddenly faced with overwhelming health or home care issues, we are the confident voice of an information specialist who understands precisely the services needed to care for a beloved parent or spouse and can access our unique, comprehensive database to find needed resources close to home. For the senior who is frail or suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or other challenges, we are a safe and caring place that provides dignified assistance at adult day centers that are second to none. To the older jobseeker, we are a friend, advocate, teacher and guide.
JCA is all of this and so much more! We are different faces in various places, but united in our mission of helping local seniors experience the positive side of aging. Last year, because of generous friends like you, JCA served more than 30,000 older people of all faiths, ethnicities and income levels. We helped them avoid isolation and live independently. We helped them thrive.
What have you accomplished?
We foster independence!
- Last year, our Senior Community Service Employment Program provided on-the-job training with pay to more than 200 older jobseekers, each with an annual income of less than $14,000. Dozens of those determined jobseekers graduated to unsubsidized employment, effectively transforming themselves from welfare recipients into taxpayers. By year end, however, dozens more were on our waiting list because we didn’t have enough funds or staff to serve them.
- Our annual 50+ Employment Expo of 2011 welcomed 3,500 attendees, making it one of the largest events of its kind in the nation. In addition to enabling jobseekers to meet with more than 80 employers and community resource organizations, we offered resume-writing critiques, job-search workshops and a cyber café – all for free. In 2010, we were delighted to find that 800 of jobseekers who attended our Expo landed a job within six months! We expect to top that success in 2011-12.
- For small groups of jobseekers age 50 or better, our new Career Gateway program provided 30 hours of intensive classroom training, one-on-one mentorships and, most important, job-search success. Within 12 weeks of attending, one of every four participants found work, typically after months or even years of unemployment.
- JCA also served as the on-site older worker expert at the Montgomery Works’ One Stop Center in Wheaton, Maryland, where jobseekers search job banks and learn effective job search techniques for free or low cost.
We offer a helping hand.
- Our Albert & Helen Misler Adult Day Center is a living library filled with stories not only of lives well lived in the past tense but also of lives still being lived to the fullest despite cognitive impairment, physical disability, illness, frailty or all of these afflictions. Last year, we served more than 100 seniors there, as many as 55 a day. Our highly trained staff of registered nurses, social workers, activity professionals and others who specialize in geriatric care provided them with a structured, supportive environment; health monitoring; dignified assistance; and wholesome, hot kosher lunches and snacks with special attention to special diets.
- Misler participants returned to their own loving families at night and our staff stayed in close touch with those families by phone, through one-on-one meetings and in group meetings, too. Fifty caregivers, most of whom were the family members of Misler participants, received hands-on training and sustaining compassion at our free Caregiver Support Groups, which are open to all. Certainly, we know that caregivers need help, too!
- Our Kensington Club at Temple Emanuel in Kensington, Maryland provided activities, camaraderie and coping skills for more than two dozen men and women in the early stages of diagnosed memory loss. Of course, many of the Club’s participants were grappling with other challenges, too, including depression, heart disease and hearing loss. At “their Club,” however, they enjoyed stimulating cognitive and physical programs as well as morning coffee and lunch while their family caregivers received respite and support.
We help seniors get where they need to go.
- Last year, our 11 handicap-accessible ElderBuses traveled so many miles that they could have circled the earth five times. Instead, they provided all their service locally. Most of their passengers were vulnerable elders. We took them grocery shopping or to adult day care, Jewish Community Center programs or other essential destinations. In addition, we carried synagogue groups, students at the Gesher Jewish Day School, families hosting reunions and others, thereby serving the larger community while enabling many of our otherwise part-time drivers, all with Commercial Driver’s Licenses, to work the additional hours they needed and wanted to work. Despite the traffic, the weather, and the multiple and sometimes painful disabilities of many passengers, many bus riders described their rides as “fun on wheels.” For some, the short but joyous trips with smiles, hugs and storytelling provided them their only personal human contact of the day. For many, the rides meant that they could continue to live in the community they cherish, not in a nursing home.
- More than 90 percent of the riders we surveyed rated JCA’s bus service as “very good” or “excellent.” Yet our fleet could never meet all or even most seniors’ needs. The Connect-A-Ride Transportation Resource Center came to the rescue, answering thousands of inquiries from older adults as well as disabled adults of all ages, enabling them to get to dialysis treatment, visit loved ones, buy food and otherwise access their world.
- Our savvy transportation experts also ran Ride Smart Mobility Workshops, managed individual transportation accounts through the our Smooth Riding program, and chaired the Transportation Providers Roundtable, a group that JCA created to foster communication, collaboration and joint program development.
We expand horizons, not only for older adults but for family caregivers, too!
- Seniors and those who love them hunger for information about aging well and for resources to help them. We were pleased and proud to bring our knowledge to those who needed it. Volunteer and staff experts representing the JCA Community Speakers Bureau and Eldercare-in the-Workplace Program were on-site at leading employers metro-wide where they exhibited, gave speeches or led discussion sessions designed to help older adults find services and solutions.
- Our Senior HelpLine information-and-referral program answered thousands of inquiries and made thousands of referrals to a wide range of eldercare providers. Nearly half of those who called us were 75 or older and more than two-thirds were women, many of whom lived alone or were caring for an ill or incapacitated loved one. Housing was callers’ top concern followed by employment options and home health.
- www.AccessJCA.org, our website, was more popular than ever. Visitors accessed the Senior HelpLine database, downloaded informative publications, hyperlinked to helping organizations and learned by reading our questions and answers about aging well. Last year, the site received nearly one million hits!
- Our Information & Education Volunteers contributed more than 10,000 hours of support, and it was our volunteers alone, all age 50 or better, who developed curricula, taught classes and counseled students in our five SeniorTech Computer Training Centers throughout the region. During the year, the SeniorTech volunteers celebrated the graduation of hundreds of newborn “computer whiz kids” who embraced technology training as a means to improve their job search or job performance, become better volunteers, expand their communication options, keep pace with the grandkids or simply enjoy learning. They learned computer basics, word processing, spread-sheeting, cybersurfing, graphics design and more.
We innovate. We collaborate. We challenge the status quo.
- JCA itself changed and grew as we welcomed Interages to the JCA family. For 25 years, Interages has been an award-winning local charity, delivering programs in Montgomery County that enable children and older adults to collaborate and become friends. More than 200 volunteers make possible its many programs, which include Grandreaders, a literacy program for children in second grade; Intergenerational Bridges, which pairs older mentors with newly arrived immigrant children in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programs; and Project SHARE, which links children of all ages to participants in adult day programs and residents of assisted living facilities. The Intergenerational Resource Center helps professionals and organizations learn from Interages’ success.
- JCA ran every one of its community service programs in collaboration with others. We were active members of many community-wide planning groups and senior-serving organizations including the Jewish Community Relations Council, Grassroots Organization for the Wellbeing of Seniors, Nonprofit Energy Alliance, and Montgomery County Workforce Investment Board.
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