According to last year’s report on agriculture from the U.S. Census, the American farmer is aging. The percentage of farmers and ranchers over the age of 75 grew by 15.1 percent between 2007 and 2012, while the number of farmers and ranchers under the age of 54 decreased by 16.1 percent during the same time period.
Several programs are trying to entice veterans into the agricultural field, while the AgrAbility Project, which helps older and disabled farmers gain various forms of assistance, is helping existing farmers to plant, shepherd and harvest longer.
In Colorado, the program enables Dean Wierth to tend to his herd of goats in Park County, despite his declining balance and vision. Using an electric cart, he is able to feed and tend to the livestock living on the 40 acres he owns, plus the additional 40 acres he leases.
“It’s been a godsend. My balance was just about gone,” he tells the Denver Post about the AgrAbility program.
For 16 years, Goodwill Industries and Colorado State University have run the AgrAbility program in Colorado, helping 538 farming and ranching families during that time. Recently, the federal government kicked in $720,000 to fund the program for four more years.
Wierth, a disabled Vietnam veteran himself, is now pitching in to start a facility that will teach veterans how to farm and ranch. South Park Heritage Association and the Wounded Warrior USA Outreach Program are currently raising funds to purchase land for the program.
Robert Fetsch, co-director of the Colorado AgrAbility Project says, “Most farmers and ranchers don’t retire; they just keep on keeping on as long as they can. Our best course for now is to help them stay active and working, so they can continue to thrive, remain independent and be loyal taxpayers in their communities.”
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Tag: Seniors
Meet the Nonagenarian Whose Generous Mission Is To Help Veterans See
World War II Army veteran Orville Swett of Port Orange, Fla., has seen a lot in his life.
The Purple Heart recipient sustained a brain injury that nearly killed him while fighting in the Battle of Anzio in Italy. Recovered, he went on to have a fulfilling career as an optician and eyeglass shop owner in Maine. In 1985, Swett retired to Florida and has been on a mission to help fellow vets see better.
Swett, now 91, inquired if the VA clinic in Daytona Beach could use a hand. “The VA had no optician when I started and I had experience. The ophthalmologist hired me immediately. I was the first volunteer in the system,” he tells the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “I do it because there was a need.”
Since then, Swett has racked up more than 38,000 hours volunteering at the VA, where he repairs and adjusts eyeglasses for vets. “I’m here for the veterans,” he says. “I work for the veterans, not the VA.”
Although Swett’s main work is to help veterans with sight-related needs, he also serves as an inspiration and source of historical information to everyone he meets — including VA interns in their 20s and fellow veterans. Dr. Dianne Kowing, who leads the ophthalmology department at the VA, says, “He gives them an understanding of their role. He’s inspiring to them. And he has a wicked Maine sense of humor.”
Swett volunteers consistently, except for three months in the summer that he spends in Maine. When he returns each fall, his coworkers are always thankful to see him. “I am committed 100 percent in helping [fellow veterans],” he said. “I was brought up that way, to help each other out.”
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One Small Town in Maine Is Trying Something Radical to Keep Its Population From Decreasing
The problem facing some Maine towns: declining enrollments and budget crunches in public schools.
As a result, some local schools have been forced to close, and the community must send their kids elsewhere for their education. The town of St. Francis, for example, was about to lose its local elementary school because only 32 kids were enrolled. Closing the facility would save the district $170,000, but result in hour-long bus trips to Fort Kent, 16 miles away.
But the residents have come up with an innovative idea that could save their elementary school: give the building to the town. Part of the structure would continue to serve as classroom space for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students, and the other part would be converted into much-needed housing for town seniors, whose rent would contribute to running the school.
Although there is much to be worked out before the plan can go ahead, both sides involved agree that it’s a good idea. The school district superintendent Tim Doak tells the Bangor Daily News, “The more we talked about it, the more it looked like a win-win for everyone. It would help keep elderly residents in the community, it keeps the kids at school and it could provide jobs.”
Local representative John Martin has introduced legislation to allow this transfer to happen. At a recent school board meeting, he said, “There is currently nothing in the law that gives [St. Francis] the ability to do what they want to do: generate income from elderly housing [and] put them in the position to apply for grants.”
Doak is hopeful that this solution could help other struggling small-town schools in Maine. “I do think this idea for St. Francis can work,” he says. “We just need to move carefully, [and] this could be a model for the rest of the state.”
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Why Does This Housing Complex Have Seniors Reaching for a Paintbrush?
For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
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How to Bridge the Digital Divide
While many claim that devices are causing people to interact less, here’s a great example of technology bringing people together.
Once a week, 16-year-old Mikinly Sullivan travels to the Frasier Meadows retirement home in Boulder, Colo., to visit her friend, 89-year-old Kevin Bunnell. The two were connected through Cyber Seniors, a program that pairs high school volunteers with elderly individuals that need help navigating new-fangled technology.
The program wants to ensure that seniors are learning to use computers — not just letting the young people figure things out for them — so as a rule, the elder person’s fingers must be on the keyboard the whole time, while the teenager coaches them through maneuvers.
Bunnell is a poet, and Sullivan has been helping him organize the many poems he’s written over his lifetime. “I love listening to the stories from when he was young,” Sullivan says to PBS News Hour. In exchange, Bunnell wrote a poem in honor of the Cyber Seniors program.
Another senior benefitting from the program is Bruce Mackenzie. “I’m taking a class at the university called Hip-Hop 101,” he says, “And I didn’t know how to listen to the rap songs that are on hip-hop. And Ryan [a teen participant] showed me how to go to YouTube, which I never knew anything about. So I go to YouTube now and I can listen to all these rap songs for my class.”
While the program’s ultimate mission is to help seniors get online, Jack Williamson, who runs Cyber Seniors, says that it “helps build relationships between young people and seniors, which is rare in this culture today.”
As one student volunteer tells PBS News Hour, “I’m learning a lot from them and they’re learning from me. I have actually found through this that I think I like older people more than I like younger people.”
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Why Do These College Students Live in a Retirement Home?
There are some unlikely residents at the Judson Manor Retirement Community in Cleveland, Ohio: millennials.
Thanks to an innovative program from the Cleveland Institute of Music, three students get to stay rent-free at the center in exchange for monthly performances.
But as you can see in the video below, these youngsters aren’t just saving money and practicing a little Bach, they’re also making a difference in the lives of older adults.
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Music is not only a form of entertainment, it also has healing powers. As AgingCare.com points out, music therapy can help with numerous conditions, including Alzheimer’s, chronic pain, Parkinson’s and more. For example, music can help an aging adult who is struggling with memory loss, because familiar melodies helps them recall past events.
“The young people do a lot for us,” a Judson Manor resident tells the CBS Evening News. Another adds, “They bring us alive!”
There should be more programs like this around the country.
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This Immigrant Turned Fast-Food Franchise Owner Has Been Serving Free Thanksgiving Dinner for 23 Years
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the line out of a McDonald’s in Denver extended out the door.
The people weren’t clamoring for Big Macs, however. They were there to partake in a complimentary Thanksgiving feast that the owners of the franchise, Geta and Janice Asfaw, have been serving to the poor of their neighborhood for 23 years.
Originally, the Asfaws cooked up a meal consisting of turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing for the area’s senior citizens, but lately, they’ve become even more generous. The event now includes a presentation of scholarships to high school students and a bike giveaway for elementary schoolers.
Last year, the Asfaws distributed 250 bicycles to low-income children nominated by their teachers for academic achievement or persistence in the face of obstacles. (Through the years, the Asfaws have united with other Denver restaurant franchise owners and nonprofits to distribute 1,700 children’s bikes.) Last year, Geta told Austin Briggs of the Denver Post, “We want them to hear that it doesn’t matter where they are today, it’s where you are 20 years from now that matters.”
Geta knows a few things about how to bring about personal transformation through hard work. He left Ethiopa to attend college in America in 1972, and after a coup in 1974 made it impossible to return home, he stayed in the U.S., earned his college degree and eventually became a citizen. In 1991, he bought his first McDonald’s franchise and now owns eight of them.
Last week, Geta told the Denver Post, “We’ve always felt that as local businessmen we should give back to the community — not just take the money. That’s what we said at the start. If we’re going to (be here), we’re going to do that. Even when we didn’t have much, we always felt it was our responsibility.”
So if you ever find yourself in Denver with a hankering for French fries, we can’t think of nicer people to get your craving satisfied by.
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When the Elderly Need Help With Chores, This Concierge Service Does the Heavy Lifting
Who has time to launch a start-up while she’s still finishing her bachelor’s degree?
Somehow, 25-year-old Amanda Cavaleri of Denver, Colo. did, building on inspiration she received during a year off from school.
Six years ago, Cavaleri was torn about what to major in: classics or business? So she took some time off and worked as a server at The Academy, a Boulder, Colo. retirement community.
Cavaleri tells Claire Martin of the Denver Post that one woman at The Academy couldn’t communicate well, though she could indicate yes or no. “I was serving coffee and tea one day, and I noticed that she always had the same kind of tea. I wondered if she might be bored with it, and might want to try a new kind. So I brought over all the tea choices, so she could pick the tea she preferred. It made such a difference to her. Who knows how long she’d had to drink that same tea? And I knew I’d found my passion.”
Cavaleri began to dream up a business plan for a concierge service for the elderly — a company that would help clients with chores and errands, especially those who live far away from their family members, while connecting millennials with senior citizens.
Soon, she founded Capable Living, a start-up she runs while finishing her bachelor’s degree in business at Regis University.
Capable Living offers help to elders with day-to-day chores, post-surgery needs and travel. And Calaveri has become one of the leading lights of the eldercare industry.
As for her future plans, Calaveri tells Martin, “One of the problems we’re trying to solve is how to get high school and college grads to work with elders, at least for a couple of years, so the younger people can get the benefit of the elders’ experience…There’s such talent out there, and so much potential. How do we shift our attitude toward aging so that we, as a society, value elders’ experiences? We need a cultural paradigm shift.”
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Why Is This 92-Year-Old World War II Veteran Kicking Field Goals?
Elderly veterans are working up a sweat as they kick field goals and ski under obstacles at the Ben Atchley State Veterans Home in Knoxville, Tenn., but they’re not having to hit the field or the slopes to do so.
These vets are competing in virtual sports — but the health benefits they receive are real.
Therapists are hooking up veterans to a virtual gaming system that involves their entire bodies in sports-themed movements. When Lori Tucker of ABC 6 visited the nursing home, 92-year-old World War II Army veteran Richard Gallaher scored all of the field goals he attempted.
“It’s a wonderful game because you get all the exercise you can do and it helps you with your balance and thinking and analyzing,” says Gallaher.
Each veteran plays a different game that build specific physical skills they need to work on, and it’s a little more exciting than the average therapy session, with onlookers cheering as the vets score.
Functional Pathways designed the gaming system, which president and CEO Dan Knorr describes as “almost like a Nintendo on steroids.” The veterans home is the first place they’ve introduced the therapeutic gaming system, but the company plans to roll it out at 140 facilities soon.
Greg Channell, one of the Veterans Home’s physical and occupational therapists, tells Tucker, “It’s fun to give back to someone whose given so much to us, and I think that’s a big part of being here.”
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This Army Vet Has Driven 165,000 Miles to Help His Fellow Soldiers Receive Medical Care
Prowers County, Colo. sits in the rural southeast corner of the state on the Kansas border, more than four hours away from Denver. Its remote locale makes it difficult for the elderly and disabled veterans who live there to get to their far-flung medical appointments.
Luckily, these American heroes can count on champion volunteer driver Cliff Boxley, who doesn’t hesitate to set out at 4 a.m. — sometimes up to four days a week — to bring them to their doctors’ appointments in Denver, Pueblo, La Junta and Colorado Springs.
Boxley himself served in the Army from 1972 to 1980 and has kept close to his fellow vets, in part through his serving of four terms on the Board of Governors for the First Cavalry Division Association.
In 2007, he started driving veterans in Prowers County to their medical appointments and has since racked up more than 6,000 volunteer hours — driving a total 165,000 miles in that time.
“I started driving because I got a call from Carol Grauberger one day. She was the person who started this service in Prowers County for the veterans. That was seven years and over 150,000 miles ago,” he tells Russ Baldwin of The Prowers Journal.
For all those hours on the road, Boxley was honored with the 2014 AARP Andrus Award for Colorado, which is given to outstanding volunteers making a difference in the lives of seniors from each state.
“Rural veterans tend to be short-changed when it comes to VA healthcare, with few advocates for them in this region. In the military, we always took care of each other, so this is my way of doing that,” Boxley tells Baldwin.
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