This is a guest post by Ann Congleton

What features led each of us to choose Kendal at Longwood (KAL) rather than some other CCRC?  Or to ask another way, what features have given KAL the particular “character of place” that makes us glad to be here?

Now is turning out to be a good time for KAL residents to ask ourselves what brought us here because KAL’s July 24 “CEO Forum” announced that the KCC has put out invitations for outside consultants to apply to guide the KCC’s “Strategic and Long Range Planning Committee” in thinking about future plans. The video of the July 24 Forum is posted on the KAL website.

The CEO Forum announcement said that resident participation is part of what is being discussed, and so it will be important for residents to think about what form of resident participation might actually be effective in thinking about what character of place KAL should seek for its future. KAL’s resident representative on the Strategy Committee is Tat Smith, so suggestions can be sent to Tat.

KAL’s founders did not just talk about what features they would like KAL’s character of place to have; they built the features into its architecture and policies. An important topic for the Committee could be comparing features that drew KAL’s current residents and staff to the features of KAL’s distinctive character of place that were built into its architecture and policies by its founders.

A possible listing of those founding features might be the following:

1. KAL was designed as a “village” of cottages surrounding a shared Center and  connected to each other and to the Center by walkways, which are now also scooterways. The presence of motor vehicles in the interior of the campus was to be minimized, so lots for resident cars were kept on the perimeter as much as possible.

 2. The whole village was to be characterized by what its Quaker founders valued as “simplicity,” which includes avoidance of excess and is a fundamental aspect of what distinguishes KAL from CCRCs whose ads compare them to “resorts” or emphasize “luxury.”              

3. The village was to be shared by residents, staff and board/management who wished to be part of an actual community, as contrasted to being simply a lot of people living in one place. Genuine community was to involve collaboration in shaping of the community. 

4. To enable KAL to be a genuine community, the number of residents was to be kept small enough – the founders thought about 350 maximum – to enable its residents, staff and board/management to be familiar with each other and thus better able to share discussion about directions and choices for the community.

As an additional support for community discussion, the founding board/management urged the first residents to form a residents’ association, saying that “the Administration will be counting on the Residents Association for advice.” The first residents held the same view and formed the Kendal Residents Association within a month after their arrival in 1973 with bylaws whose opening “Purpose” clause begins “to promote and further the interests and welfare of the residents of Kendal.”

The immediate success of KAL led to a flood of applications. The board/management decided to preserve face-to-face size by not expanding KAL but instead creating a second face-to-face community, Crosslands, and it sought the advice of residents through a KRA questionnaire of all residents. When Crosslands opened, the board/management created a triad administrative structure to further protect the face-to-face community character of each of the two CCRCs. The triad consisted of an “Administrator” for each CCRC with the two Administrators  coordinated by the Executive Director of the corporation as a whole.

5. The founders set the KAL village in the midst of abundant acres of woods and meadow and spaces for gardens. These grounds were and continue to be cultivated and conserved by KAL residents and staff working together. That collaboration continues today, including collaborative work to save the Big Woods and collaborative work by the Energy committees, which date back to KAL’s opening. In this period of increasing global awareness of the need to achieve sustainability, further related efforts are also emerging, such as a hydroponics pilot project which is already producing greens for the dining rooms, and a project to strengthen vegetarian alternatives on the menu and reduce reliance on products of factory farming.

6. KAL was to be affordable by retirees from “lives of service.” These include fields such as nursing, teaching, the arts, and social work, fields which our society fails to remunerate in proportion to its dependence upon them. People choosing lives of service are also likely to be contributors to the vitality of their own “neighborhoods.” That remains true when they come to KAL, where they are among the most active contributors to its studio and performance activities and its social support at KAL itself and in Kennett Square and elsewhere.

This affordability by retirees from lives of service was therefore built into both KAL’s architecture and what it called its “Financial Design.” Architecturally, KAL was built with a range of cottage sizes and costs. Four sizes of cottage from “studio” to two bedroom were intermixed, and each side of the original village “squares” or “courtyards” included equal numbers of all four sizes as far as possible.

The “Financial Design” was described by saying that it would “employ a comprehensive fee structure which socializes costs in such a way that people of lesser means are able to join our community.” In at least some colleges which explicitly follow the practice of “socializing” tuition fees in order to include more scholarship students, the practice has been found to reduce economic resentment or defensiveness for everyone because the practice is known and thus it is recognized that the top fee payers are just as likely to be supporters of the social values of the institution as are the recipients of scholarships.

The policies supporting affordability also included avoiding extra “fees-for-service” in order to “avoid…. economic distinctions among residents and preserve the egalitarian nature of our community.” Egalitarianism in communities is recognized as contributing to what is today sometimes referred to as a sense of “belonging” or “inclusion,” and making adherence to egalitarianism clear as a community practice can have the beneficial impact of encouraging self-selection among applicants for admission.

In addition to economic inclusion, further dimensions of inclusion have always been desired and are increasingly being proactively sought at KAL. One such increase has been the 2024 hiring of a Manager of DEIB (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging”).

7. KAL’s Center from the beginning has included its dining rooms and mailboxes so that residents are drawn from their cottages into the community. The Center also includes KAL’s auditorium, library, arts studios, meeting rooms and other spaces for community activities, with all of the Center’s spaces meant to be as open as possible to all members of the community, whatever their mobility or other health conditions. And from the beginning, all the activities of KAL’s Independent Living (IL) residents have been planned and conducted by KAL’s IL residents themselves without need for the paid Activities Directors employed by other CCRCs.

8. KAL’s Center also includes its Resident Care clinic for Independent Living residents and its personal care and skilled nursing wings for community members for whom their Independent Living cottage has become no longer manageable. As a fundamental aspect of the total design of KAL, these residential wings are part of the community Center itself so that their residents will continue to be participants and contributors in KAL’s community life for as long as they are able, assisted by both KAL staff and residents still in Independent Living.


Features such as these were not considered in the July 24 CEO Forum, which was limited to comparative data about business aspects of CCRCs as part of the “senior living industry.” A useful account of some of the data relevant to the KCC is provided by George Alexander on this blog in an 08/01/2024 post entitled  “What is KCC’s place in a growth-oriented industry?” Hopefully the Committee will eventually consider what features the KAL community believes would be best for its future.

Posting a comment on this blog is a valuable way to contribute to community consideration of what features today’s community members would like KAL to have, and one of the virtues of this blog is that it makes it very easy to post comments or questions. All that is needed is to scroll down to the “Leave a Comment” section at the very bottom of this blog page and begin typing in the space labeled “Write a Comment,” being sure to remember to click on “Comment” at the end so the comment will actually be sent!


My own comments at this point are that I share the concerns that there has been erosion of KAL’s character of place through erosion of the founding features of its architecture and policies. I share the hopes that today’s community will choose repair rather than disregard of those features. Coming to share those concerns and hopes led me to begin an inquiry into KAL’s history. Through that inquiry I have come to believe that the roots of the erosion of KAL’s character of place lie in the effect on KAL’s board/management of the shift of the United States as a whole out of the decades of the 1960s and 1970s in which KAL was created. The shift was into the era beginning in the 1980s which included a resurgence of influence in the U.S. of corporations characterized by a more “top-down” approach to decision making and emphasis on competition in “the market.” I have tried to shape what I think I have learned into an essay about KAL, and the current draft of the essay is attached here.

Comments – including corrections, elaborations, disagreements, suggestions, alternative approaches, whatever – will be welcome as further contributions to community discussion, and they can be posted below.