Introducing The New Age Of Aging

In a special section on serving older adults in the summer 2004 issue of the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine, Chuck Tommasulo, executive director of Family Service Agency of Mid-Michigan, Flint, commented, “What I don’t understand is that four years from now, the baby boom generation will be reaching age 62. Three years later, they are going to start getting Medicare. The crunch is going to come and what are we, as a society, doing about it?”

The Alliance is doing something about it. In yet another example of our commitment to fuse intellectual capital with superior membership services, the Alliance has secured a new five-year, $2.6 million grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies to improve the readiness of the nation’s nonprofit human services workforce to serve older adults.

The New Age of Aging: Building Competency and Capacity in Human Services furthers our commitment to informing and influencing how the nonprofit human services workforce thinks about and responds to the variety of issues and opportunities related to the significant increase in the number of older adults in America.

The following special section of this magazine explains in detail the activities and opportunities this new grant will provide to the Alliance, our members, and others in the nonprofit human services field. It also provides perspective on just what we are all facing in the years to come.

We must all recognize that this issue reaches beyond meeting the needs of the rapidly expanding population of older adults; it is very much a workforce issue. Through this grant project, we have an excellent opportunity to engage older Americans in the human services work Alliance members and others perform. But, we must remember our grant responsibilities are not to solve aging problems, instead they are to prepare the workforce to serve this population.

Instrumental to the success of our planning phase was a volunteer steering committee. My thanks to them for their expert counsel and assistance that helped us secure this significant grant.

I also want to welcome Jonette Arms to the Alliance as project director of The New Age of Aging. Her experience and expertise will ensure this project provides all the benefits possible. I believe we can help create a new mindset among human services organizations by helping to provide the capabilities, insights, interest, and skills to offer quality care and best practices for older adults.

Goodbye to Longtime Leader
On June 20, 2007 the human services field lost a champion when Mike Danjczek passed away. As executive director of the Children’s Home of Easton, Pa. for more than 30 years, Mike was a tireless advocate for the many kids who passed through the home. I knew Mike for many years and admired him more each time we came in contact. He was a “Johnny Appleseed of Joy” with a certain infectious quality of optimism. Yet none of that sense of the glass always being half full could ever mask the determination that Mike had to simply do right by children. He was an inspirational person and truly one of the best in this field. I will miss his honest advice and friendship.

An Appreciation and Heartfelt Thanks
I would be very remiss if I did not take this opportunity to convey my genuine appreciation to Susan Dreyfus and what she has meant to the Alliance during her four-and-one-half-year tenure as senior vice president and chief operating officer. As you probably already know, at the end of July Susan bid us goodbye as she moved on to a new position and a new phase in her professional growth and development.

Susan’s contributions to the growth and success of the Alliance have been extraordinary, and I am deeply gratified for the level of commitment she gave to everything she did for the Alliance, our members, and the nonprofit sector. The success the Alliance enjoys in the future will be in no small measure a reflection of what Susan helped to engineer.

A national search for Susan’s replacement has already begun. Helping with that search will be Bob Duea, who will serve as interim senior vice president and COO of the Alliance, a position he held five years ago after his retirement from Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.