Hello. This is Larry Minnix. Thanks for taking a few minutes with me. This is the time of year where we should give you an accounting form. The time, energy, effort and dollars that you contribute to make this association, LeadingAge, your association.
Just yesterday I had Rich Schutt from Providence Life Services, based in Chicago, and one of his board members, visiting with us. His board member asked, “So, what do you guys do for us?”
Great question. Fair question.
I explained to him that our association is a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) organization. We exist for the public benefit. Secondly, I told him we had three core businesses. Applied research, leadership development and education, and advocacy.
We have about 84 people that work here that help with that every single day. We’re proud of that staff and the results they have accomplished. The indicators come out through membership retention and strong finances.
The real purpose of an association is to lead and to serve. We’re pollinators of your great ideas, and we’ll transform the field, as we always have, because you have an innovative spirit and innovative culture. I want to show you a few examples of that in just a minute.
…but I want you to know that this past year we’ve had some great success on Capitol Hill in a difficult environment. We have been able to work with the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation to channel millions of dollars into capital grants for low-income housing with services projects.
We’ve developed a number of toolkits to help you manage your Medicare reimbursement through our Leading Age New York member tools, that are free because you are a member.
We’ve developed strategic planning toolkits to help you with your technology planning and for partnering in your community with housing and services opportunities.
We’ve developed a thrive campaign that’s a self-responsibility campaign, that, if you follow it, you will get better and be prepared for a bright future.
We’ve provided leadership in Washington to fundamental problems, like how are aging services going to be paid for in the next generations. We’ve pulled together some 60 think tanks, foundations, members and political influencers in Washington to help look at alternative ways to pay for things in the future.
We’ve brought in new staff to help us with manage care and to help you compete in a manage care environment as we look to the future.
…and we know that capital is woefully lacking, and we’ve brought in a talent to help us look at how you rethink public policy and capital in the future.
We’ve even worked with the National Cooperative Bank and Grantmakers in Aging to help create a loan fund that is based on your deposits, which are insured, to be able to borrow money to do innovative kinds of projects.
I could add more to that list. We’re most proud of the fact that our leadership development program, The Academy, reached its 300 fellows milestone and we have helped develop with our state partners and some of our members two dozen or more similar kind of programs throughout the country.
We also have a mechanism to help members who may not be able to afford consultants to be able to think through things like strategic planning and board development and leadership development in the future.
The real test of whether or not an association works eventually shows up, and I can’t take credit for any of this, but the biblical admonition, by these fruits you shall know them. I look at John Knox Village in Florida.
They’re discovering and rediscovering the talent inherent in their residents and employees so that people can have a new lease on life based on their great life experience.
I look at CJE SeniorLife in Chicago. What a great organization, and they’re doing wonderful things engaging their community in things like how to age healthy through a program, and literature on the secrets of longevity.
We have Presbyterian villages in Michigan, along with Methodists in Michigan, that put together 17 sources of capital to create housing and assisted living on the river in one of the most difficult parts of Detroit, and they couldn’t do it without philanthropy.
They’re leading the way in making the case for foundations and individuals to give them money to move that cause forward. I think about Alzheimer’s disease and the Great Minds gala that we have cooperated with—with our friends at Copper Ridge to draw attention to innovative programs.
We know Alzheimer’s is not going away, and if we don’t excel in that kind of difficult care, who will? Here’s our member in Rhode Island, Hope Alzheimer’s Center and others are emerging.
Wellspring in North Carolina. Traditional CCRC years ago, and now PACE programs and relationships with hospitals and other agencies in the community as an example of creating—moving from castles to kingdoms in the community.
Western Homes in Iowa. They’re repositioning, yes, new facilities as many of you do, but they’re pioneering in pulling together technology companies and universities to see what better service can be delivered to broader populations in rural areas through the use of technology.
Of course, we have to be mindful that we’re here as not-for-profit charitable organizations to address some of the most difficult problems in our society. Here is The Hearth.
I got their annual report, you ought to look it up. Mark Hinderlie — they are based in Massachusetts, and they’re pioneering in homeless housing—they have the objective of eliminating homelessness in Massachusetts.
Now, that’s a public benefit organization with a scope of mission and purpose that is a defining example of what our responsibility is together so that one day we can all say these major problems have been successfully addressed.
That’s what Leading Age is all about. We’re here to share your ideas and to take those ideas to Capitol Hill, and eventually get changes in policy to make it easy for you to do your vital work that, by the way, won’t get done without you.
Look on our website. We’ve got plenty of information. Let us know what you’re doing. I love to read these reports, and I put them in my speeches as I go across the country, because the leadership is coming from you.
Our job is to catalyze those efforts and to tell your story, and we want to do a better job of that every single year that we exist. Thank you. Let me know of anything we can do to help you.