GREENFIELD — With the United States’ median age older than ever, communities across the country and locally are now faced with the challenge of making themselves a better place to age in place.
In Franklin County and the North Quabbin, that task has been taken up by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) with the long-term Age- and Dementia-Friendly Program, which aims to improve the region’s systems and infrastructure to allow older adults and seniors to remain in their homes.
As LifePath and FRCOG develop an action plan based on feedback from a 2022 needs assessment survey, the agencies brought community members to Greenfield Community College on Thursday to solicit feedback and share what some towns in the region have been working on to make themselves more age-friendly.
“Being age- and dementia-friendly is not a cookie-cutter process,” said FRCOG Regional Public Health Nurse Meg Ryan. “Everything done is based on local needs. … We want your input.”
While every town’s need is different, Ryan and LifePath’s Age- and Dementia-Friendly Program Manager Carol Foote said there were several common threads among Franklin County and the North Quabbin communities in the survey, which received about 2,000 responses.
Topping that list were concerns about transportation and lack of knowledge of what kinds of services are available, especially mental health resources. Analyzing that data, Foote said the two consistent phrases they heard from people were, “I don’t know how to find the information I need,” and “I feel isolated.”
From here, LifePath and FRCOG will develop an action plan incorporating survey feedback and the work that volunteer workgroups have done, and then begin implementing the action plan over the coming years.
Following the presentation, two town projects were highlighted for their efforts in working toward an age-friendly community.
Kicking things off was Hawley Selectboard member and firefighter/EMT Hussain Hamdan, who shared his town’s emergency database project. Hawley sent out a survey to all residents through its street list and asked folks for their contact information, medical and health concerns, whether they need electricity to run their water and other relevant information for when a disaster strikes. That information is then put into a spreadsheet that can be accessed by first responders during a townwide emergency, such as a power outage or flood, to determine who may need to be checked on.
“When we’re sending people to go check on somebody, they’ve got a list of people,” Hamdan said. “The task of figuring out who’s in serious trouble becomes a lot simpler. … That’s a great tool to have.”
He added it’s also an opportunity to see which residents are willing to volunteer their service to the town in an emergency, which can take the load off the firefighters and EMTs who may be dealing with higher-priority calls.
The tradeoff for the database, though, is it requires an immense amount of trust between residents and the town because people are being asked to share sensitive medical information. In Hawley’s case, Hamdan said the spreadsheet is kept offline to remove any chance of this information being hacked or leaked onto the internet.
“We take a lot of precautions and safeguards,” Hamdan said. “There is a huge amount of trust involved in getting people to volunteer this type of information.”
Following Hamdan was South County Senior Center Director Jennifer Remillard, who shared how her center is working on addressing transportation gaps in the towns of Deerfield, Sunderland and Whately by forming workgroups to identify the physical and mental health complications that can result from a lack of transportation.
She highlighted that the center had a community conversation with the Franklin Regional Transit Authority (FRTA) earlier this month and has scheduled a conversation with the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), which serves Sunderland, on Thursday, June 29.
“We’re trying to see how we can remediate that gap,” Remillard said.
For more information about LifePath’s and FRCOG’s Age- and Dementia-Friendly Program, visit bit.ly/46ia65L.
Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.