Community Living Advocates provides a network for senior care

SALINA— After years of helping her mother take care of her elderly grandmother, Nancy Aureli figured there had to be an easier way to find and manage the care loved ones require as they age. “I am an RN and still didn’t understand what to do,” she recalls of those years providing care. Even though she worked as an oncology nurse and routinely dealt with end-of-life care at work, Aureli says it was so challenging to figure out where to go for the different services and care her grandmother required. “There’s got to be a better way of helping people take care of their loved ones,” she recalls thinking, so she set out to create one. In 2017, Aureli took over an informal networking group in Onondaga County and turned it into Community Living Advocates (CLA), a network of more than 140 businesses, nonprofits, organizations, and others that provide services for seniors. “I took it and I just decided to grow it into something that was a lot bigger,” she recalls. CLA members include businesses like pharmacies, medical-equipment suppliers, and transportation providers; professionals serving the senior population including lawyers, insurance companies, and real-estate agents; nonprofits and agencies providing services including housing, rehabilitation, therapy, and at-home care; and even small businesses that provide services like installing ramps. “We have someone who actually will go in and do gardening for seniors,” Aureli says. The CLA network has helped connect seniors to members for the services they need, which, in turn, helps the member organizations thrive. But more importantly, working together means seniors — or those caring for them — are never turned away without a connection to services they need, says Tess Kenney, community relations manager at Touching Hearts at Home and CLA’s Onondaga County coordinator. “It gives us the opportunity to help our clients better, because we can’t do it all,” she says. So, if Touching Hearts at Home receives a request for something it can help with, Kenney is able to go right to the CLA member directly and steer the person in need toward a business or organization that can help them. Along with maintaining an active network for referrals, CLA also provides regular networking events for members to build relationships and boost that referral network. CLA, which has an office at 220 Beechwood Ave. in the town of Salina, also hosts several events throughout the year that give members a chance to get into the community and connect with people who may need their services. Its annual expo, scheduled this year for May, attracts several hundred attendees, Aureli notes. CLA also hosts senior fairs at senior centers with more than 100 people typically attending and holds a retirement showcase every fall. “We also [provide] resource bags for discharge planners at the hospitals,” Aureli says. Discharge planners are employees who help coordinate continuing care for patients who are well enough to leave the hospital, but still need care going forward. Often, Aureli says, these employees have to develop their own network of care providers, so CLA gives them the resource bags to give them a head start. The organization also provides a resource page on its website (www.communitylivingadvocates.com) for each county it serves — Cayuga, Cortland, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, and Oswego. “People don’t know what they don’t know,” when they are overwhelmed by caring for a loved one, Kenney says. “They don’t even know what to ask.” CLA is making sure to provide the questions — and the answers — that seniors and their caregivers need.