thank you so much for joining us today for caring for the caregivers with barbara brown harvey your host we have a very very interesting guest with us here today very well known very busy in the community her name is joe cowan dick clark and she is the coordinator caregiver specialist for integrated services formally graded trance and behavioral health care and by workshops support groups counseling programs she does so much for the community she's executive director of the senior program and support groups a majority of them are in the robert wood johnson fitness and wellness center we have a group for spouses care for spouses we have a group for children caring for their parents we have a caring for the caregiver group there once a month and we also have a life after caregiving group there now you know i care for my mother yes and the spouses group told october meet monthly and it's on a monday morning a lot of the support of helping people to move through the loss as well as finding that building in lawrence and they always provide a nice little stacks of people have to come right from work or from wherever they are happy with their with their having to do we do it it's from six to seven thirty and we don't have to have a person in the facility it's open to the public all of these groups are open to the public so there is that there is the second thursday of the month which i think for september that would be i think is the tenth september tenth  and then we on tuesday mornings we have every tuesday we have a group that meets at the brook dale assisted living facility on white horse most of the road and it it's a group of people some have family members that are there and some have family members that all swear but it's a very tight group they're helpful they've been going through this whole process of support for for their family members who may have group and that's from six to seven that again is that robert wood johnson fitness center so we try to have something as you know other places so that people you know it's excess appeal to them being the group that o'clock that we we also coupled with a lot of education and we also are also do groups i did a group i was really excited about the group i did on friday night because one of the things we've been trying to do so get into the church is we know that there are a lot of people caring for family members in the churches and church and many times that people have not a clue what those people are going through this and they pretty much suffer at home the symptoms because as i said the first thing caregivers are told this is learn as much as you can about the illness so we know a lot of people are going through dementia and alzheimer's and then there's other some some have you know advance stages of other disease and other types of dementia so we did that and i was really really happy because i have been trying for the last four or five years even to get into do the some of the senior workshops that much of the other part of our program and the people you know people have questions the one thing the one thing that i hear every time i do a group like that is people will say i didn't know anybody else was going through what i've been going well some you know so just i've had people you know in the group and we give people a chance to do this especially the first timers because they come in they have so much to share so much to talk about and we try to give them enough time without infringing on the needs of the other people to just get it out because if it's a safe environment the groups are confidential everything that's that's shared i confidential we don't use it for anything else other than maybe to to you know use it as a bin yet with no names or anything involved but people will say oh my goodness i feel like i've had fi years of therapy you know just being there with other caregivers hearing what they're going through and listening to how they have handled different situations because people really don't understand they don't and it's so hard to understand why they don't well i'll tell you my mother had cancer my mother and my sister were both diagnosed with cancer in one the same week mother on tuesday sister on three said i was living in california and my although i had other family members in in houston my mother my sister in houston my sister was taking my mother from her team oh and dropping her off and then going to another part of the hospital for talking emo because she had breast cancer i never she she kept me up to date what was going on but i never knew the difficulty that she had now in hindsight i'm kicking myself that i didn't you know work something out of my schedule so at least gone down the air and given her a week or so of some respite but they're both passed on now this is back in the ninety but the ninety's but i didn't understand exact any kind of assistance you can give write them down to the grocery store like what can you do to help out because it is indeed it is and for some reason people because even happen to have a clue right you know i don't have a clue either our program is from the county office on aging ok and we work along with the you know the federal programs that provide other benefits and services and your main office is in trenton yes we're  access to a room at the church most of the time so i might have people meet me there i may have people meet me at robert wood johnson sometimes we go to restaurants but i try to you know find another place we can go to the library find a corner to have people talk or that we do some form counseling but most of time it's one on one and one of the things that i tell caregivers is to find something that you can have that your sometimes children find it hard to even be around their parents when they are in advanced stages of dementia because that's where very very hard to accept that this mom is not who she was before so what i say to find something that that person can do if it's your brother and he says i'm working ok one day make the appointment and say why don't you come and take us so that i don't have to  any help right and that they have reached out to siblings you know even their parents their parents apparently and no one will be reach out and if they reach out is minimal right and it's not enough to get them in the real just the one person can carry that heavy burden and it's like where do they get that that mentality from so i have been the caregiver is going through social exhaustion mental exhaustion pastors back in the early early seventy's when they realize it is their senior members didn't have things to do this was before the days of all of the senior centers yes just getting started with senior nutrition programs to try to bring seniors out  but this group of a couple of lutheran pastors in trenton started this program they started doing arts and crafts and the pastors themselves they joke about one is still alive they used to actually go in cook for the seniors and the program good it grew to be to be offered in a number of churches some of them are no longer in op you know an operation but right now we started off as summerfest it was an activity during the summer of seventy one and they had all these activity to treat trips and things like this and this was for the emotional and spiritual well being of the seniors nine hundred seventy three was incorporated into was incorporated as the ethical stood for elderly communication help and outreach and so reviving information for seniors and help for them throughout the you know their aging years and also some place for and i was just moving back year and back of about a year from california and saw this little thing in the paper a little and and apply for the job and i've been doing it since then and we've we've done many programs we do focus on the same kind of things i do with the caregivers educational groups workshops we sponsor some of the evidence based programs like taking control of your health in a matter of balance and things like that but that what is good about it though is that it is a senior run and senior operate all of us are seniors yes and the board of directors to seniors and that's important because many times seniors get pushed away you know this church is they've been real busy but now the younger people are coming in and this is to keep people involved and connected i want to and we have heard testimonies from seniors there was one we have one senior her name is betty and she was taking care of her husband for a year she was his caregiver was very very difficult for her because he had to dementia and whatever and went to help the children were one lived out of state and the other one had a disability but she said when he passed she found that and she said it literally changed her life and wonderful she's going to be i think ninety five she's been a member of hundred eighty three and she serves on the board and she's having to give it up but it just is just people helping people she goes and picks up much younger see you wouldn't it is it is very rewarding when so that's and in two thousand and twelve as are we we had some funding we were getting from the county but another agency got their funding and leak we knew i looked at what we had i said if you guys keep paying me we will be closed so at this time this is issued opened up the greater trenton and i was able to do it it was the time the hours were of such where i would spend my f off hours  saturdays doing the echo and doing my other things with great a trend now folks integrated here so hopefully i'll be able to go back to that at some time and carry some of the things that we're doing with the that started off with the incorporation was elderly care helping out which but back in two thousand and two or two thousand and three before my time they had a contest they wanted to get the elderly out of right the group goes from our youngest active member is is actually fifty eight and our eldest member is not going on ninety so that's the stretch of our membership so they had this contest and they ended up they chose energetic citizens helping others that's nice so that's what i'll stands for i like that and if you see our logo  trips coordinate trips they planned the big activities we have we just had a picnic with sixty five people on the grounds of the church we had a strawberry festival in june it was one hundred twenty five seniors and that's the biggest part of it is because seniors get to come together and we we are the only thing organization like this because we are county wide we actually have people that come across the bridge from from yard to is that right yes i i worked started jesting maybe a year before albert bill robinson became the executive director and then when he came in i guess he saw that was someone that would try to do anything you asked and do it and learning from him i did i i i was the we actually organized the neighborhood councils that were supposed to be resident run organize we had elections and things like that then i went into program planning learn how to write learn how to write grants and manage programs through that was went to some training at rutgers  program the senior community service employment program which was run by run by be different national contractors we had one with we had a contract with national council many aging and we had twenty seniors that were placed in  throughout the city in non profits we paid them they work part time we paid them and that program was a national program from there i was went to the state of new jersey worked for the division on aging running the state while program which was about six hundred fifty seniors so from u p i s program was twenty slides to the state and was i covered the entire state we had people in the nutrition programs and senior centers jewish family services government offices seniors that were retired or maybe never worked i loved it because we had women who never had a chip never worked with come and use their their skills that they had as mothers and wives and  all of their jobs i left and now moved over to the county and was the chief of the community services division which is now i believe three different divisions right and then i left and i'm doing that time apart you probably saw i was involved with the school board what i was president young children and then you moved up to the right and this thing this is and then well i'm very it's been interesting because i've always been interested in education and i found out in from our family that my grandfather well as an educator my cousin has done a lot of genealogy study and he was an educator he got his degree from teaching from prairie view which is now that it's in the blood is in the so much older than i have all been getting into the school board was because my children were going to private school and that an opening came when we were in the midst of being taken over and i was appointed to the board elected to the board and it was a pretty difficult year but we got a lot in five years but we got a lot done and so then i moved to california and when i got out there national council even had an opening  program six hundred fifty six hundred seventy five seniors throughout los angeles county is the size of new jersey one house so i was the program coordinator development specialist and did that and and we had adults that had major mental illnesses they came in and we got them we got them apartments we got them jobs we got them stabilized many some of them are still i still am in touch with them after twenty years and i was always a manager i was always enjoyed writing grants you know managing the programs developing the programs working with staff supervising after counseling we had sixty seniors that we that spoke seventeen different languages and they did a lot of the work for the different agencies so we and then i just my last job i had in california was as a director of a senior multipurpose senior center and but between  challenging job is parenting and i had two sons who were parents and i have two daughters but my spoiled the son my sons were parent and i was doing the school board and and i wanted to give them the wisdom in the insight that i what the book is about that you get it you seek your guidance from the lord because he's the one who made you the parent and he's the one that can give you the inside it was that i don't think that's right so thank you so much for watching  recipients of care please take advantage of some of the services can you give them a contact number just sure my number is at integrating here is six o nine three nine six six seven eight eight extension two