MJF constituent agencies work together for dignity of elderly
“Thank you, American public,” Fanya Khotimskaya, 96, a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, said in the little English she knew during an interview. She has good reasons for this gratitude.
She was born in Kiev in 1906 and came to Milwaukee from Moscow in 1980. She is now in frequent pain from arthritis. She also has a pacemaker helping her heart.
She has family in this country, but they live too far away to be able to care for her daily. Nevertheless, although she can hardly do anything for herself, she does not want to live in a nursing home.
Thanks to the state of Wisconsin’s Family Care program, applied in Khotimskaya’s case through Jewish Family Services — a constituent agency of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation that receives funds from the annual community campaign — she doesn’t have to.
Khotimskaya has her own apartment in the Golda Meir House, which is owned by the federation and provides housing for low-income elderly people. Every day Lilia Gorelik, a personal care worker from Independence First, which contracts with Family Care, helps Khotimskaya with such basic needs as eating and bathing.
In fact, the Family Care program literally saved Khotimskaya’s life last summer, according to Natalie Schneider, a case manager at JFS’s Family Care unit who works with some 40 Family Care clients.
Last July, during one of the more oppressively hot days, Khotimskaya’s air conditioner broke, leaving her struggling to breathe.
But she was able to alert Schneider and Gorelik. Through the Milwaukee County Department on Aging, which administers the Family Care program in the county, they were able to obtain a new air conditioner and have it installed the next day.
Program at risk
In such ways, Family Care helps Khotimskaya, hundreds in the Jewish community — some 200 through JFS alone, according to Judy Strauss, JFS vice president of program services, plus others at Chai Point, the Jewish Home and Care Center and elsewhere — and thousands in the general community to live with dignity as much as they can, said Schneider.
Moreover, it does so in a cost-efficient way, said Schneider and Strauss. To keep an elderly person at home through Family Care costs an average of $1,560 per month, as opposed to nursing home cost of $5,000 to $6,000 per month, said Strauss. Family Care also provides for nursing home care and group home residency and care where those are requested or appropriate.
Yet for all the good it does for clients and the efficient way it does it, Family Care, which began in 1999, is a program “at some risk,” according to Barbara Beckert, assistant director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, another constituent MJF agency.
Though Family Care was created by the administration of Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, his Republican successor, Gov. Scott McCallum, did not include in the 2001-2003 budget funds to expand the program beyond the five counties in which it currently exists; and he vetoed a bi-partisan attempt to add such funds, said Beckert.
Moreover, said Strauss, “The worry is that if it just stays in the five counties, it will create a two-tier system in terms of types of services available to older adults.”
According to Beckert, “Nearly 10,000 people are on waiting lists to receive community-based long-term-care services” in counties that don’t have the Family Care program. That could provoke legislators to wonder why some counties should have this and not others, so they “may delete it for everybody,” Strauss said.
And the Jewish community has a profound stake in having this program continue and grow, said Beckert. The 1996 “Jewish Community Study of Greater Milwaukee,” the study of the population coordinated by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, found that about 5,000 people or 20 percent of the greater Milwaukee Jewish community is 65 or over — and that proportion is likely to grow.
Moreover, the study found that some 40 percent of Jewish “heads of households” age 65 or over in the greater Milwaukee area have annual incomes under $25,000.
So JFS and the MJCCR are collaborating with each other and with other organizations like the Coalition for Wisconsin Aging Groups in advocating for the continuation and expansion of the Family Care program.
In one example of this effort, on Sept. 12, staff and lay leaders of JFS and the MJCCR, plus staff from the Milwaukee County Department on Aging, met with Milwaukee Democratic state Reps. Timothy Carpenter, Peggy Krusick, Sheldon Wasserman and Jon Richards’ staffer Tara Vasby to discuss the Family Care program and its future.
On Tuesday, Beckert, JFS executive vice president Elliot Lubar, Wisconsin Jewish Conference director Michael H. Blumenfeld and state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) were scheduled to meet with Phyllis Dubé, secretary of the state’s Department of Health and Family Services, which oversees Family Care, about putting the program in the department’s coming budget.
Lubar said that legislators have been “very receptive. That doesn’t mean we will get everything we want, but they understand the basic issues and are very supportive.”
And the advocacy effort, he said, “is a great partnership with the [MJCCR] and us. It shows how a couple of agencies can pool their resources and get stuff accomplished.”
Jewish Family Services received $609,200 from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation Community Campaign 2002, and the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations received $167,200.
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