Senior adults are not what they used to be. In fact, maybe they shouldn’t even be called “senior adults.”
“Today people aren’t ‘older adults,’ they are adults,” said Jay Roth, executive vice president of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. “I think everybody recognizes that the adult today is different from the adult of 30, 20 or even ten years ago.”
Partly in recognition of that, the JCC and the Milwaukee Jewish Home and Care Center, led by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Agency Relations Committee, are reorganizing two programs: the JCC Senior Center and the kosher meal program that the JHCC administers under contract with the Milwaukee County Department on Aging.
“What happened,” said Marci Taxman, chair of the Agency Relations Committee, is that the JCC had been telling the committee’s Older Adult Services Panel “for the past several years that [JCC staff members] were seeing changes in the types of services that the senior population wanted to have available to them.”
The population here is much healthier and more active; “at 70 they look like 55 used to,” said Taxman. They are not so interested in eating a big noon meal. They also live more in the North Shore suburbs — Taxman said the “center of the population” is Silver Spring Dr. — and they find coming downtown to the JHCC, where the Senior Center has been meeting, to be inconvenient.
So, within the next few months – Roth said a possible date is April 1 – the Senior Center will move north, meeting at Congregation Beth Israel three days a week and at the JCC’s Karl Campus building on other days. Eventually, the entire program will move to the JCC once the Karl Campus is renovated.
Moreover, the JCC is “trying to define a model of adult services that would appeal to a broader cross-section of adults within the Jewish community,” a group that includes “‘empty-nesters’ and older,” said Roth.
So the JCC is visiting sites in Chicago, meeting with a consultant from the Jewish Community Centers Association, assembling an advisory group and a program committee to “evaluate and determine the kinds of activities that this group would find interesting, stimulating and attractive,” said Roth.
The JCC brought its ideas to MJF’s Older Adult Services Panel, whose members “are very well educated as to the older adult population and the changes in the demographics,” said Taxman. And panel members “felt it was critical for the JCC to be allowed to make this move and respond to what [its staff members] were hearing from the community.”
According to Betty Lieberman, MJF director of planning and strategic services, “this is probably one of the best examples of agencies working with our community allocations process to develop a plan for the best use of community resources,” she said.
Lieberman added that the federation has provided funds for start up and renovations required at CBI for the program, and that they are a reallocation of funds previously provided to the Senior Center at the downtown site.
In addition, the kosher meal program has been reorganized. Not only will it stay at the JHCC and remain the only one of the county’s 28 meal sites serving kosher food, but that organization also has “assumed the responsibility for programming at this site as well,” according to JHCC president Mina Tepper.
As of Jan. 2, the program was renamed the Lakeside Senior Enrichment Program. While Taxman said the primary motivation for participants, many of whom live in that neighborhood, is the meal, the county’s mandate for all the meal sites requires that additional programming be provided as well.
Tepper said that JHCC is “using a team approach in providing a variety of programming” before and after the meals. She said these programs comprise about 50 percent participation activities, 25 percent “lecture and learning” and 25 percent entertainment — although some of the offerings cross categories, like the ever-popular ballroom dancing lessons.
Tepper said the JHCC is also publicizing the meal and programming offerings at the site through monthly mailings to “a large mailing list” of possible participants and weekly flyers distributed to people attending.
The federation is also providing funds for start up and marketing of the program and will continue to fund 30 cents for every meal served, which is the additional cost of providing kosher meals above the money provided by Milwaukee County.
Tepper added that transportation to the site from within Milwaukee County is available, paid for by the county.
For more information about these programs, call the JCC, 414-964-4444, and the JHCC, 414-276-2627.
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