Healthy Aging Martha’s Vineyard, an all-volunteer coalition founded in 2013 to tackle the needs of the Island’s aging population, announced last week a new collaboration with Martha’s Vineyard Community Services and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
“We have been a grassroots model,” said Healthy Aging chairman Paddy Moore at the annual meeting of the coalition. “The peculiarities of that have caused some people to pay attention to us, and that’s nice, but we need to be sustainable.”
Under the new agreements, Community Services will be the coalition’s fiscal agent, providing the office support needed to operate Healthy Aging and manage its finances. The long-established human services nonprofit will also assist with communications, outreach, marketing and the Healthy Aging website, which is currently offline.
The Martha’s Vineyard Commission will contribute planning support, projections and analysis of the Island’s population and other data, and grant and writing services. Available numbers already indicate that the Island is aging rapidly, Ms. Moore said.
“By 2030, one in three people on Martha’s Vineyard will be 65 or older,” she said. “We all know this growth is happening.”
The coalition plans to ask the six Island towns for about $71,000 a year to hire an executive director. While Healthy Aging has received grants and private funding for programs and services, “it’s not at all easy to find money for operations and staff,” Ms. Moore said.
Community Services and the commission will join the executive committee of Healthy Aging, which also has an independent board and will retain its autonomy. The new agreements were announced at Healthy Aging’s annual community meeting last Thursday morning at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.
About 50 people attended the half-day session, which began with an energetic keynote speech by David P. Stevens, executive director of the Massachusetts Council on Aging. Mr. Stevens praised the Island’s network of Councils on Aging, in which services vary from town to town.
“I love what you’re doing here,” he said. “It’s very important to get out of our boxes, our municipal boundaries.”
Not every senior center can offer all the services elders need, Mr. Stevens said, and the pool of available funding is growing more shallow. Martha’s Vineyard has taken the lead with a regionalized approach, he said.
“We are going to need to work together as resources become tighter and tighter,” Mr. Stevens said. “The model you have created is the model that will achieve that.”
While upbeat in his delivery, Mr. Stevens had some sobering news to share. The new federal budget aims to slash services for elders, he said.
“Meals on Wheels, congregate meal sites, older worker programs — those are all going to be chopped. There will be cuts in Medicaid, the program we now call Mass Health, that will have a massive impact. Cutting ACA (the Affordable Care Act) would have a billion-dollar impact on our state.”
Along with partnerships among Island nonprofits, Mr. Stevens emphasized the need for volunteers to work with older adults. “The government is not going to be able to pick up the pieces,” he said. “It’s all part of a jigsaw puzzle. There is no one quick fix here.”
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