Council on Aging Board

The City of Lowell • Council on Aging 276 Broadway Street • Lowell, MA 01854 P: 978.674.4131 • F: 978.970.4134 www.LowellMA.gov Council on Aging (COA) Advisory Board Healthy Aging Committee Friday, March 6, 2020 at 10:00am Council on Aging Conference Room 276 Broadway St, Lowell MA 01854 Meeting Minutes I. Attendance: Marlena Chau (Outreach), Mary Connolly, Beverly Gonsalves, Lillian Hartman (Director), Andrew Hostetler (facilitator & recorder), Eric LaMarche, Amy Pessia, II. Electing Committee Chair: The committee decided to use a rotating chair system. Each month, a different committee member will schedule the meeting, prepare an agenda, and facilitate. III. Narrowing & grouping goals: We discussed collapsing the categories brainstormed last meeting based on MySeniorCenter activity categories and the SAMHSA dimensions of well-being, or simply based on the categories of activities included in old versions of the mission. We decided to go with the latter for the time being. IV. Drafting mission statement: We worked as a group to revise the mission, and came up with the following: “The mission of the Lowell Council on Aging is to enrich the lives of the older adults and the community. The COA promotes the well-being and independence of adults 60+ through advocacy and programs, including food/nutrition, health/fitness, outreach, education, socialization, and transportation. The Lowell COA is committed to honoring the diversity and building on the strengths of seniors.” We are considering dropping most of the first sentence and combining with the second sentence, and perhaps listing programs in a separate sentence. Further edits may be forthcoming, and we will discuss at the Board meeting on Monday, 3/9. V. Discussion of assessment tools for evaluating independent living  The City of Lowell • Council on Aging 276 Broadway Street • Lowell, MA 01854 P: 978.674.4131 • F: 978.970.4134 www.LowellMA.gov a. We reviewed assessment tools provided by Lillian and Andy. Based on the materials we reviewed, Lillian will put together a brief questionnaire focused on identifying the areas of greatest concerns for older adults in Lowell, and framing questions in a way to encourage candid responses. b. How these might be used to evaluate the impact of our programs and services? Ideally, these would be used to identify things we could do, through programming and services, to help seniors maintain independent living. VI. Update on Age Friendly & housing and homelessness initiatives: The Age-Friendly Lowell project was selected to submit a full proposal to the Tufts Health Plan Foundation (for $600K). The decluttering group met; 8 people have signed up for classes. The foster grandparent group is doing monthly trainings. VII. Collecting data on and prioritizing seniors' needs (i.e., what they want or get from the senior center?) a. For the time being, these efforts will be focused on the independent living assessment. We discussed how best to disseminate the assessment. Eric indicated that he could administer to veterans and widows of veterans. We discussed mailing the assessment to all adults 60 and over in Lowell (using Census records); perhaps the Friends could financial support this, and/or we could piggyback onto a mailing the city is doing. b. Word cloud: We talked about doing a word cloud by first doing a post-it mural, in which seniors would respond to the prompt: “What does the senior mean to you in one word?” VIII. Amy will convene and facilitate the next meeting, to be held sometime before the April Board meeting (TBD). IX. We adjourned a 11:26 AM.