Grotta Fund awards grants to help seniors in their homes

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

The Grotta Fund for Senior Care of the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest New Jersey is providing three local organizations with $300,000 apiece to strengthen in-home services for needy senior citizens.

The grants to the Jewish Family Service of MetroWest, the Jewish Vocational Service of MetroWest, and Overlook Hospital are intended to “provide the support required to assist older adults who wish to live with dignity in their own homes for as long as possible,” according to the fund’s requirements for bestowing the monies.

Nancy Scher of South Orange, president of the fund’s advisory council, said the new three-year grants will enable the agencies “to make more of a difference” by allowing them three years to plan, study, and tweak their programs before seeking other financing sources. “The emphasis is on grants to direct services, all aimed at helping seniors remain in their own homes,” she said. “All of them were made to agencies that provide services on a nonsectarian basis.”

The JVS grant is aimed at solving the problems that arise when seniors need basic home repairs. Intended to make aging in place a more pleasant experience for people in north Jersey, the grant will provide “chore services” to the homebound elderly — such tasks as cleaning garages, changing light bulbs, unclogging drains, and fixing leaky faucets for people who are disabled or frail and “should not be risking their safety by doing things like climbing ladders,” said Karen Ford, JVS director of grants and development.

“It is a program which we hope will meet a lot of unmet needs in the community, not just for those who needs the chores done, but for handymen and women who would like to do work that helps others,” she said. “It is hard to say how many people will take advantage of the program after it gets going in mid-spring, but we expect to provide 3,000 hours of services in our first year.”

A second $300,000 grant is allowing the Jewish Family Service to expand its Community House Calls program. For nearly two years, JFS social workers have teamed up with nurse-practitioners trained in geriatric care who are employed by Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Through the program, which uses a holistic approach to health care for the community’s senior citizens, teams of nurses and social workers are dispatched to homes of the elderly to check on their well-being and medical needs, said Leah Kaufman, JFS director of transitional elder services.

With the aid of its grant from Grotta, the JFS has expanded the program to assess and meet the health needs of people in Newark, Irvington, East Orange, South Orange, West Orange, and Livingston.

After evaluating the medical, financial, and emotional needs of seniors who live in private homes and apartments, the JFS social workers enlist the nurse-practitioners, who perform examinations, order treatments, and prescribe drugs for patients — all under the supervision of physicians at Beth Israel with specialties in gerontology.

“There are many seniors who may be isolated from health services,” Kaufman explained. “We want to make sure that their needs are assessed and that they receive the care they need.”

The third award is for a palliative care program run by Overlook Hospital in Summit that will pair a trained home-care nurse and a social worker to provide help for the elderly in west Essex, north Union, and eastern Morris counties. Together they will evaluate the needs of 150 chronically ill senior citizens who have what the hospital calls “limited caregiver resources” and who “no longer meet insurance criteria for home-care services.”

After checking out prospective clients, the nurse and social worker will make six months’ worth of home visits to each one — not only to assist seniors with managing their medications, but also to connect them to other services available in their communities. The house calls will be augmented with check-up phone calls and follow-up assessments.

“It is natural for older people to want to be independent,” said Jeanne Kerwin, coordinator of the Overlook Ethics and Palliative Care Program. “Hopefully this program will provide additional resources to these seniors to extend their ability to remain independent and to enhance their quality of life.”

Grotta’s Scher said the grant selections were made “after a competitive process. We had more than 20 proposals, and there were a lot of good applications. We’ve told many of those not chosen to reapply for one-year grants. It was hard for us to make the decisions, but once we made them, we were very pleased.”

The $7 million Grotta Fund for Senior Care provides grants to not-for-profit organizations serving older adults in Essex, Morris, and Union counties.

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.