Developing
"Aging Prepared" Communities
By Paul Grondahl

The Hartford Research Project Team: From left, Jean McGinty, director of St. Peter's Home health care; Jean Burton, medical social worker with the St. Peter's Homecare agency; Professor Zvi Gellis of the University's School of Social Welfare and also the Hartford National Faculty Scholar; home care supervisor Linda Tierney; social worker Elizabeth Misener; and Alison Ruggiero, Gellis's graduate social work assistant. With support from the Hartford Foundation, the team is developing a screening procedure for detecting depression in older adults.

Professors and graduate students from the University’s School of Social Welfare and its Center for Excellence in Aging Services have completed a feasibility study and are moving into the intervention phase of their project to develop “aging-prepared” communities with a $150,350 planning grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation. Based in New York City, the Hartford Foundation is one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for the elderly.

“What’s striking in working with staff members from the Hartford Foundation and other private foundations is that they have an interest in doing things differently, and they’ll sit down with us and develop proposals jointly. That’s not always possible with public funding,” said Philip McCallion, director of the Center for Excellence in Aging Services. McCallion has also undertaken a pilot project analyzing intervention strategies for people with Alzheimer’s using Hartford funding.

“Private support is absolutely essential because aging research is an area of expanding opportunity and takes many supporters to help us accomplish our goals,” said Katharine Briar-Lawson, dean of the School of Social Welfare. “We continue to explore partnerships with foundations and other private agencies so we can increase our services and relevant research in support of the aging and
their families.”

Briar-Lawson pointed to a $500,000 endowment from the Hearst Foundation, an arm of the publishing corporation, which provides $10,000 stipends for at least two graduate students annually in the field, as particularly significant. “The students chosen for Hearst internships in aging have the potential to become premier leaders in their specialty area,” Briar-Lawson said.

One of the recipients of a Hearst internship in aging this year is Libby Strabo, who is completing her final semester toward a master’s degree in social work. Her internship is at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, working with case managers to help elderly people who want to live independently in their own homes. “My long-term interest is geriatrics, particularly a community-based agency,” said Strabo, who is from Syracuse. Strabo said the $10,000 Hearst stipend is making it all possible. “I’m from a working-class family and I had a lot of loans from my undergraduate degree, so this was a great benefit,” Strabo said. “I don’t know how I would have done it without the grant.”

The Hartford Foundation also provided $365,000 over three years to fund a dozen graduate student stipends of $10,000 per year for graduate students who are specializing in working with the elderly after graduation. Rather than the traditional method of placing a student intern in a specific agency for the elderly, the new approach allows the intern to follow a few elderly people through various agencies whose services they use. “Students get a much more holistic picture of what elderly people experience when they use services, and observing that feeds into a much broader educational experience,” McCallion said.
The need for such innovative collaborations among private funding sources is particularly acute for those working with elderly people, given demographic projections. By 2025, New York State’s population of people older than 60 is expected to increase 40 percent from the 1995 level, rising from one in six to one in four New Yorkers, McCallion said. Nationally, there will be an estimated 70 million Americans 65 years old and older, or roughly 21 percent of the population.
“We chose UAlbany because it features an innovative collaboration between the University’s School of Social Welfare and the New York State Office for the Aging, which we feel is a regional partnership model,” said Laura A. Robbins, senior program officer for the Hartford Foundation.

School of Social Welfare Professor Zvi Gellis, director of the Center for Aging and Mental Health and also a Hartford scholar, is beginning a two-year intervention study to develop a screening procedure for detecting symptoms of depression in adults 65 years old and older. Research has shown that about 20 percent of those 65 years old and older, typically living alone in their own homes or apartments, have symptoms of depression, including feeling sad, poor sleep and appetite, social withdrawal and suicidal thoughts. This older adult population has the highest rate of suicide in the country, Gellis said.

Gellis and four graduate students funded through Hartford are studying the differences between one group of elderly people who receive typical home health-care services and another group who receive home-health care services in addition to specialized cognitive behavioral treatment from a clinical social worker one hour each week for six weeks. The intervention, which takes place in the elderly person’s home in the Albany area, includes teaching ways to deal with depression by improving problem-solving skills, self-worth and increasing social supports and pleasurable activities. The activities might include receiving a phone call from a grandchild, attending church services, reading or visiting a friend.

Editor’s note: The School of Social Welfare has 29 faculty members and about 550 students in undergraduate, master’s degree and doctoral programs. The School is ranked 19th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and fifth in the country in terms of faculty productivity by Social Work Educational Journal.

For more imformation about support for the School of Social Welfare, please contact Dean Katharine Briar-Lawson at 518-442-5324.

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