From Our CEO: Finding Solutions for our Seniors

Even though many of our programs were paused this spring due to the pandemic, I wanted to share some good news with you about the progress we’ve made on our Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC), which serves the community of Stapleton/Rosebank.

Stapleton qualifies as a NORC because it is a community that has a large proportion of residents over 60 but was not specifically planned or designed to meet the needs of seniors living independently in their homes. The NORC, named GO KOSSAH (Keeping Our Seniors Safe And Healthy), serves as a complementary service provider to our Stapleton Neighborhood Senior Center.

The Joan & Alan Bernikow JCC received one year of funding in 2019 to conduct a community needs assessment, which would determine what services seniors in the area needed most. Year one funding was also used for monthly educational events to inform community residents and partners of the services that the NORC plans to offer in the future.

Between November and March, our NORC Program Coordinator Linda Huff was able to complete nearly 250 surveys of seniors. In that short amount of time, we were able to gain the trust of the community, and through that trust, community members were willing to share their comments and concerns with us.

Though responses were varied, the main services that residents requested are assistance with health insurance navigation, transportation, and health services. We assembled these findings into a report, with the help of the Staten Island Partnership for Community Wellness (SIPCW), detailing the first year of progress of our NORC.

You can read the full report here.

---

We are grateful to SIPCW for their help and to Councilwoman Debi Rose for allocating DFTA discretionary funding to this project. With additional funding allocated for the 2020/21 fiscal year, we plan to forge ahead and begin to address some of the issues we discovered throughout the survey process. In the year ahead, we will use the data in the report to guide us as we determine how we can best provide these much-needed services to this community.

Despite the pandemic, we know the need for these services continues, and we are committed to working to ensure that these seniors can reside independently in a safe manner. We look forward to working with our community partners on creating solutions that will improve the quality of life for seniors in Stapleton.

If you’d like more information about the program, contact Amelia Winter at [email protected] or 718.475.5238.

---