WISE & Healthy Aging, the Santa Monica-based social services non-profit serving seniors who live on the Westside and beyond, has received a $100,000, two-year grant from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation of Los Angeles, announced President and CEO Grace Cheng Braun.
The Parsons Foundation grant will provide core support to strengthen and expand four of WISE & Healthy Aging’s key programs, Cheng Braun said. These are:
• WISE Adult Day Service Center, the only designated Alzheimer’s Day Care Resource Center (ADCRC) on the Los Angeles Westside, providing day care, respite, and caregiver support
• In-Home Care Management Services to support seniors living in their homes as long as possible, preventing premature institutionalization
• Caregiver Training through the newly established WISE & Healthy Caregiver Training Academy, providing lay (family) and career (professional) caregivers high quality training through a nationally-recognized curriculum
• WISE Connections, a virtual community that supports “aging in place” for older adults on the Westside, and Club 1527, an alternative to a traditional senior center that offers a more sophisticated level of programming geared to today’s active older adults
“The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation has awarded this core support grant at a time when two trends are converging: an unprecedented increase in the number of older adults who need services such as those offered by WISE & Healthy Aging, and deep, almost certainly permanent, cutbacks in government funding of senior services that make providing them more difficult,” Cheng Braun noted. “The Parsons award will allow us not only to maintain our key programs, but to invest resources in business planning and marketing so we can strengthen and expand revenue-generating programs. That will make us more self-sustaining in good times and bad,” she said.
For more information about WISE & Healthy Aging’s extensive range of free and fee-based services for older adults and caregivers, please call (310) 394-9871 or go to www.wiseandhealthyaging.org.
