The statistics are startling--and challenging. Within 15 years, the number of Californians 65 and older will double. And by 2040 California's population older than 85 will increase by 625%.
Just in the Conejo Valley of Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park and Westlake Village, more than 17,000 residents are older than 65. Almost half of these people live with a chronic physical condition that limits their daily activities.
While life expectancies are being extended by miraculous advances in medical science, better nutrition and more sensible lifestyles, for many people the process of aging still carries the load of debilitating frailty, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stroke and other ailments.
Historically, this has edged the frail elderly out of the mainstream of family and community life into a nether world of drifting and waiting. And, if they are not institutionalized, the burden of care falls heavily on the time and emotions of stressed family members. We're not taught how to be caregivers to our parents or spouses. One morning we wake up and we are one.
Seventy-eight percent of all caregivers are women; 40% of caregivers are employed and spend about 47 hours a week giving care, in addition to a 40-hour-a-week paid job.
American business loses $11 billion to $29 billion each year to its employees' need to take time off to care for aging family members.
That's why a nonprofit social service organization called Senior Concerns has been helping for the past 25 years. And why that largely privately funded volunteer agency has expanded its coverage throughout Ventura County and into western Los Angeles County, and taken on the huge challenge of enlarging both its physical facility and participant programs to help cope with the "aging wave" already upon us.
Senior Concerns operates the Fitzgerald Senior Day Support Center on Hodencamp Road in Thousand Oaks, which provides more than 10,000 person-days of care each year for the frail elderly and seniors with special needs.
Senior Concerns Meals on Wheels, the agency's inaugural service started in 1975, now delivers more than 36,000 nutritionally balanced hot lunches and light evening meals annually to homebound seniors.
Participants in Senior Concerns programs commonly pay for the services on a sliding scale determined by their financial ability to contribute. But no one is shut out of participation because they are unable to pay.
