NaCCRA Forum: Resident Life

Channing House, a life Care CCRC in Palo Alto, has never had an administration furnished activities director in our 50+ years. We create, organize and operate all our own activities thru a resident Entertainment Committee with multiple subject oriented subcommittees such as lectures, daily/monthly calendars, musical presentations, our chorus, trips & tours, etc. Because we are adjacent to Stanford University, our resident contacts get many expert lectures and musical events from the university community which we often share with Zoom to other senior communities in the area.

One subcommittee is the resident Audio/Visual team that does lights, audio, visual, recording, Zoom, and staging for all our events in our Auditorium and other venues. The AV team knows more about the technical AV than does our administration.

A different resident service is our Tech Help Team. Sixteen tech-oriented residents are on call to fix all that technology that residents keep misunderstanding or breaking. In the decade the team has existed, we have done 8,000 calls for service.

Our Resident Driven Life Care Community, Wake Robin in Shelburne, Vermont, has resident volunteers who do all of this with minimal support from staff. For events, especially those that take place outside normal working hours and on weekends, residents operate the sound system, the video and record events which are subsequently repeated on our internal TV channel but occasionally filed in DropBox if the speaker/performer has given permission to share outside the campus. This is but one endeavor carried out entirely by resident volunteers.

It is similar in my community. There are residents trained to do such things. Movies and many recorded musical performances are often shown in the evenings or weekends when there are no staff to do it, so they are started by volunteer residents. There are also volunteer ushers.

A possible and more during solution may be to form a volunteer group for supporting community life activities where volunteers are assigned as event greeters and providing audio/visual technical support. We have such a group and at the start of each month a schedule is provided of all events and volunteers signup for the events they can attend and support. This took a while to convince folks to sign up but once it was in place the contribution and value of having that kind of support became obvious. Prior to that supporting events was hit or miss resulting in cancellations and late starts, especially on weekends and evenings when staff support is not available.

This is one very disappointing aspect of the CCRC in NM that I live at - there is a shocking number of important, but not life-threatening - jobs that are one deep. If the person doing that job is gone, or leaves, it just doesn't get done until they return or replaced. This is an area ripe for management development - perhaps it is wide-spread. Is there an organization (maybe it is NaCCRA) that could provide training for managers of CCRC's in the area of operations such as this?

I do not think this is willful on the part of management, more likely time and funding constraints.

It has just been announced that the activities coordinator is going on medical leave for several months so there will be no streaming or videoing of evening events like concerts.

Do other communities have a back-up person in situations like this? I cannot imagine any system where there isn't a plan for continuity.