As 2021 draws to a close, we are pausing to reflect on the past year – a year that has seen the continuing devastating impact of the ongoing COVID pandemic, which we are recognizing as becoming endemic and has disproportionately affected both older adults and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Highlights of the year include the announcement of our new strategic plan, which describes how we will achieve our mission to improve the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers through the integration of health and social services. We also recognize that there is much work to be done to advance a more just and equitable care system.
To that end, we have outlined our investment in the Three Ts: Teams, Training, and Technology, in continued support for capacity building for non-profit organizations, including a focus on reducing racial health disparities, and speaking out on important current and emerging issues such as ageism and Aduhelm.
We cannot do this work alone. Achieving a vision where social services and health care are connected and operate seamlessly will take the continued, concentrated efforts of many partners, grantees, and colleagues. We hope you will continue with us on this journey. In our work, we will continue to learn, listen, and improve our approaches and practices at every opportunity.
We are filled with gratitude for the work you and your teams are doing to improve care for older persons and to create systems that will make quality care a reality for all.
Please read along as we recount our Top 10 blog posts of 2021:
- Our Plan to Improve the Well-being of Older Californians and Caregivers, by Christopher Langston, September 22, 2021: As I just mentioned, Archstone Foundation’s new strategic plan will strive to accomplish our goal to improve the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers by building more effective cross-sector Teams, providing appropriate Training to all for their roles on those new teams, and supporting the development of appropriate Technology for efficient teamwork – known as the Three Ts. We will measure our impact to be sure that we are making real change in people’s lives and to be sure that our efforts are reducing, rather than exacer1bating, racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities. This blog by President and CEO Christopher Langston provides more details about our new strategic plan and our vision for how we will help achieve better lives for older Californians and their caregivers.
- Advancing Team Care That's Person- and Family-Centered, by Jasmine Lacsamana, September 28, 2021: With our new strategic plan, we want to support projects that can advance models of person- and family centered, Team-based care, demonstrate improved outcomes for older adults and their families, and are structured to achieve more cost-effective care. This blog about Team care by Program Officer Jasmine Lacsamana explores examples of quality team care, including placing the older adult at the center of the team, and the future for our work in Teams.
- Training: An Essential Element of Effective Team Care, by Jolene Fassbinder, October 19, 2021: Simply put, effective team care requires training. Social services and health care cannot collaborate effectively without learning from and about each other, the formal processes of teamwork, and client-centered care. This blog about Training by Program Officer Jolene Fassbinder explores how Archstone Foundation will center its grantmaking on training health care and social service providers, professionals, and paraprofessionals on effective, evidence-based team care models, with a focus on improving teamwork and enhancing the expertise and skills needed to provide quality care for older adults.
- Technology: The Key to Timely and Coordinated Communication, by Laura Rath, October 26, 2021: Technology grantmaking will focus on promoting the adoption of technologies that facilitate teamwork and empower older adults and their families to direct their own care. In this blog, I discuss why Archstone Foundation is well positioned to use advocacy, standard setting, convening, and public communication as tools to advance the technological infrastructure to achieve better care.
- California’s Master Plan for Aging Takes Promising First Steps, by Mary Ellen Kullman, March 10, 2021: Following an intensive and inclusive 18-month planning and engagement process, California’s Master Plan for Aging provides a bold blueprint for aging across the lifespan in the most populous state in the nation. This blog by Mary Ellen Kullman, Vice President, highlights the main points in the Plan, which represents a 10-year commitment to improving how we all age in California. It calls on state and local government, businesses, philanthropy, and others to ensure that the changing landscape for California’s 10.8 million older adults in 2030, and their caregivers, is planned for in partnership and with older adults' well-being in mind.
- A More Thoughtful and Systematic Approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, by Christopher Langston, January 11, 2021: As we worked on our strategic plan and as we as a nation convulsed in response to the murder of George Floyd and ongoing violence and injustice faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, we realized that we needed to both unequivocally state that Black Lives Matter and to try to build racial justice in our work in a more thoughtful and systematic way than we had in the past. We also recognize that the added barriers of poverty, language, and racial or ethnic discrimination make the challenges of aging even harder for some groups of people. In this post, Christopher Langston, President and CEO, describes some of the beginning steps we are taking in our internal operations and grantmaking to begin to redress a history of discrimination and ensure that racial disparities are reduced.
- First Grants in New Program Help Advance Racial Equity, by Laura Rath, April 20, 2021: Recognizing that speaking out against hate, violence, and racism directed at Black people, as well as Indigenous and People of Color, which includes Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, is only a first step, we have begun to support grantmaking with a specific purpose of advancing racial and ethnic equity. Addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is — and will remain — a priority across all of Archstone Foundation’s strategy areas as we work to achieve a more just future. In this post, I describe the first three grants awarded in response to our Request for Proposals (RFP) for “Stimulating Innovations and Building Capacity to Support Diverse Communities and Advance Racial Equity.”
- Ageism Goes Underground as COVID Suffering Continues in Daylight, by Jolene Fassbinder, February 22, 2021: While we’ve known that COVID-19 was bad for lots of us, it was really bad for those of us who are older and for those with underlying health conditions like heart disease and diabetes. According to the CDC, we also know that older people of color have been particularly hard hit — hospitalized at three times the rate and dying at twice the rate as their white peers. Our public policy response continues to be debated, but underlying these actions (and inactions) has been a set of ageist ideas that directly and indirectly devalue older people. This personal and important post by Jolene Fassbinder, in collaboration with John Beilenson, President, SCP, and member of the National Advisory Committee of the Reframing Aging Initiative, discusses the tragic consequences of our unwillingness as a nation to address our implicit biases about our aging. It also calls for more age-positive perspectives and messaging to help drive policy and practice investments and real change.
- New Capacity Building Support Program Catches Fire! By Laura Rath, August 17, 2021: Beginning in the spring of 2021, we began a new partnership with Catchafire, a social enterprise and nonprofit that matches professionals who want to donate their time with nonprofits who need their skills, in order to offer an additional method of support to non-profit grantees and applicants to our Capacity Building RFP. As part of the SoCal Collaborative, Archstone Foundation supporting 100 organizations in the field of aging to receive Catchafire capacity building support. As of December 2021, 22 organizations have matched for capacity building projects saving their organizations an estimated $320,000. If your organization has already been invited to participate in the Catchafire cohort, we encourage you to register and get started with a capacity building project or to reach out to schedule one-on-one consultation by emailing help@catchafire.org. Or, if your organization is interested in participating in the Catchafire cohort and is a past Archstone grantee or applicant, and have not yet been invited to participate, please drop us a line to join the interest list for future cohorts. Read this blog for more information.
- Aducanumab: One Thing We Can Agree On, by Christopher Langston, July 13, 2021: This summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, Aducanumab, which will be known as Aduhelm. The drug is very controversial, and the evidence about the benefits of the drug are unusually unclear. What is clear, likely uncontroversial, and has been brought into sharp relief, is the pressing need for a far more organized and supportive system of care for people with dementia and their families whether they choose to take Aduhelm or not. In this timely post, Christopher Langston gives his rationale for why, if Medicare is going to cover this drug and its infusion, it must require that providers selling this service also have the capacity and competence to provide comprehensive geriatric health care and effective care coordination for their patients with dementia, as well as training, respite, and support for their caregivers. This moment is an opportunity to transform dementia care and make sure that care is provided that bridges social and health care needs, while placing the older adults and their family at the center of the care team.
On behalf of the Board and staff of Archstone Foundation, we wish you a healthy and prosperous new year. Please continue to reach out to us to share your thoughts and ideas for improving the lives of older persons. And we invite you to bookmark our Point of View blog and check back often in 2022 for new updates about how our Three T grantmaking strategies are unfolding, as well as for thought-provoking discussions of current issues important to improving the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers.
