Blog Archives
RMD time?
The end of the year approaches and it’s time to think about required minimum distributions. Did you know you can take some of your RMD as a qualified charitable donation and maybe reduce your tax burden that way? Cville Village, as a 501c3 charitable organization, can receive such donations.
This article from Forbes explains it. Now that we’re starting to orient volunteers and getting ready to launch early next year, we have bills coming due for insurance and a LOT of printing, and your help would be greatly appreciated.
Website enhancements September 2023
We’ve just done a minor renovation to this website. We added:
— FAQs under the Welcome/FAQs tab;
— A fillable volunteer interest form on the Volunteer page.
And we began the modification of the page header with our new logo. More to come with the header.
Please check out the FAQs and if you’re planning to volunteer, the interest form is waiting for you!
Find us on Facebook! Volunteer for Cville Village!
Acknowledged: Not everyone loves Facebook.
But now that we’re ramping up to start being an actual Village and also working on renovating this website, keeping up here AND on Facebook, where we have 82 followers, is too much for one person (me). So I invite you all to join Facebook, or go back to it if you haven’t been there for awhile, and check out our page: Cville Village. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070023673136
Since I’m here already, I’ll post a brief update. We’re recruiting volunteers now, from anywhere in/around town. If you’re interested, here are a couple of ways to proceed:
Send an email to cvillevillage@gmail.com and let us know of your interest.
Attend one of our informational sessions at The Center this month:
Wednesday, September 27 at 5:30 pm or
Friday, September 29 at 11 am
Same program at each session so you only need to attend one. Come and find out what it’s all about, and how YOU can make a difference in your neighbors’ lives.
Annual report 2022-23 is here!
It’s been a very promising year. We recently compiled our very first annual report for Cville Village! For those interested, you may read it in full below or download it.
We’re excited for what the coming year will bring: a new website and, we hope, our long-awaited launch!
Where are we supposed to go?
So, in our Google Alerts yesterday, or maybe Tuesday, who remembers, was this. The way I read it, apparently we boomers are irresponsibly aging in our homes and making it hard for younger families to become homeowners.
(We do empathize with younger families. They have no idea what it was like to live in a country where the top marginal tax rate was 90% and public goods and services were adequately funded. It wasn’t uncommon for a family to thrive on the equivalent of one full time income. States funded public education and university tuition was affordable for most.)
Our point here, though, is: where exactly are we supposed to go to age? There’s an implication that because younger people need the space we live in, we ought to go somewhere else for our declining years. Perhaps some of us will want to do that but a senior community – or silo – is not for everyone, besides which not everyone can afford to buy into one. Look, our communities should support us to be where we’re comfortable (albeit not necessarily the comfort of the older couple pictured). And that support must include the practical help that a Village – Cville Village! – will offer.
Older adults in this country need care.
Seems the issue of care for older adults with health needs is trendy. A piece in tomorrow’s NY Times Magazine features a young woman whose life was knocked seriously off track when she had to provide care for her ill and injured father. This is a problem fairly unique to the US among higher income countries. For instance in Australia, a family we know needed to cope with the consequences of Dad’s lung transplant. They received help from a federal program that partly replaces the salaries of family caregivers, so Millennial Daughter was able to stay home and look after him. Here, our family caregivers like Randi give up practically everything. Home health care is expensive assuming one can even find someone to provide it. Long-term care insurance, which in theory would pay a caregiver, is increasingly unaffordable.
Cville Village volunteers won’t provide the kind of care that Randi does for her dad. But we would be able to help out with non-personal care responsibilities: picking up groceries or a prescription from the pharmacy, or just sitting with the older adult, relieving the caregiver for an hour while she gets some fresh air. Sometimes a small service can make a huge difference.
One more for the weekend
Here’s a story about robot companions for older adults in Italy, the country that apparently has the highest proportion of older adults of any in the global West. We’ll admit we’ve thought about writing a grant to acquire a robotic dog to lend out to Cville Village members, but that dog would not take the place of human companionship!
The Village model in the press! and your lazy editor
We get daily alerts from Google on the topics Healthy Aging and Aging in Place. Lo and behold in yesterday’s updates there was this gem from the Washingtonian: More Older People Are Opting to Age in Their Homes. Here’s How…
And there’s a description of the Village model with examples, which they have plenty of, because DC has something like 12 Villages just in the confines of the city, not even counting the nearby VA and MD ‘burbs where Villages also thrive.
Your lazy editor has been working on a grant proposal and finishing off the OLLI course. The latter ended yesterday with a lot of enthusiasm from the attendees. Their numbers were somewhat diminished as we had to postpone from last Tuesday after yours truly was unwittingly exposed to COVID the previous week, but luckily never developed symptoms and never tested positive. But the conversations, questions, connections made even over a little 3 week course were rewarding.
And yes, we are recruiting for Cville Village planning committee members; it’s getting exciting now as we think about structure and function while doing this grant proposal, in light of the feedback from the course.
News that will (not) surprise you re: home health care inequity
Imagine: Black and Hispanic elders are more likely than white elders to receive in-home care from unpaid “informal caregivers,” according to this article in Home Care magazine.
It reports on a national survey of Medicare recipients by the Commonwealth Fund. The issues of concern, beyond the essential inequity, include an increased risk of inadequate care by untrained family members, and the burden imposed on those family members, who must take time off or even give up paid work to provide care.
Medicare does offer a home health benefit, although, unfortunately, it seems to be widely misunderstood. Our Cville Village will work with JABA to make sure members know what their benefits and rights are.