On May 6-9, KCC (Kendal-Crosslands Communities) residents had the opportunity to participate in sessions to contribute their ideas about various aspects of KCC’s upcoming strategic plan. The sessions each lasted 90 minutes and involved up to 10 residents. In all, more than 140 residents took part.

 The sessions were loosely organized around four themes: Changing Healthcare, Support to Age Confidently, Enabling Technology, and Global Issues (from here on, I’ll just call them Healthcare, Aging, Technology, and Global Issues).  Detailed descriptions of these themes appeared in my last blog post.

In addition to brainstorming about those themes, each resident group also had a SWOT discussion (thoughts on KCC’s Strengths/ Weaknesses/ Opportunities/ Threats). Each session had a host (a member of the committee working on the strategic plan) and a recorder (a resident volunteer who took notes).

On May 14, the hosts of those resident sessions gathered to report on what they had learned. There were two reporting sessions of 90 minutes each, one at Crosslands in the morning, and one at Kendal in the afternoon. They were available to residents on Zoom (and links to the recordings are available on the CRA and KRA websites). I have done my best to extract and list the main ideas from them.

In doing this, I have lost a lot of the nuance and detail provided in the reporting. Someone else would summarize the meetings differently, so I encourage those of you who are interested to go back and watch the videos in full.

In what follows, I will list the steps that were proposed to address Technology, Healthcare, and Aging topics. These three areas had a lot of overlap. Then I will do the same for Global Issues. After that, I will list important topics for which no specific actions were stated. Finally, I will outline the next steps in the strategic planning process.

As you will see, there are far more ideas here than could possibly be incorporated into a strategic plan. And many of the ideas may be things that, on reflection, we don’t really want to do. There are hard decisions ahead. But I think it is worth making a long list like this just so everyone has a clear picture of what the major options are, and can be thinking about the priorities they would assign.

The ideas are listed in no particular order. They are not my ideas; they are the ideas that the session hosts reported from their sessions. Although resident participants were instructed to think about where KCC needs to be in 5-10 years, many of the ideas could be done immediately, and a few are already under way. I listed them anyway.  

Technology, Healthcare, and Aging. These three topics are thoroughly intertwined, as was clear from the reporting on the resident sessions. What follows is a list of some of the possible specific actions we could take to address these issues. To keep these lists manageable, I had to leave out some ideas. If I have omitted something you consider important, please use the comment box at the bottom of this post to mention it.

Steps we might consider in the overlapping areas of technology, healthcare, and aging:

  • Issue smart watches to residents (for vital signs, fall detection, more)
  • Employ voice recognition like Alexa/Siri (control lighting, make calls, get menus, learn of events, more)
  • Improve Zoom training and support (communication)
  • Implement monitoring devices (falls, behavioral changes, more)
  • Use robots where appropriate (dining, medicine delivery, companionship, personal care, more)
  • Implement keyless entry (prevent wandering outdoors, allow emergency cottage access, avoid lost keys)
  • Implement automatic lights (provide light immediately when needed, save electricity when no one is present)
  • Campuswide communications services (single campuswide WiFi system, better cell service)
  • Connected personal-care rooms, so couples can share quarters
  • Large screens in every room, with easy software for communicating and participating
  • Spaces for socializing/pub
  • Improvements to transportation (better bus & van service, perhaps supplemented by Uber or Lyft)
  • Common platform (everyone gets a tablet with identical software for easy access to commonly-needed information and services)
  • Implement medical records/medical portal (access to personal records, both at KCC and in other medical systems)
  • Implement AI for routine staff paperwork (AI systems to fill out regulatory and medical paperwork)
  • Train housekeepers to help with monitoring (they might notice behavioral changes or changes in neatness, etc.)
  • Develop a plan for future staffing problems (this includes retaining as well as recruiting staff at all levels)
  • Provide housing for staff
  • Medical partnerships (with hospitals or university health systems)
  • College & university partnerships (for staff recruitment, for sharing infrastructure experience, more)
  • Make home health care more available (it might be smart to make it free, if it is less expensive to operate than personal care services)
  • Make sure KCC is staffed/equipped for upcoming healthcare changes
  • Prepare KCC to deal with increasing levels of cognitive decline

Steps we might consider that emphasize technology:

  • Create a collaborative technology committee
  • Provide better tech help (better use of resident expertise, more equitable access for less tech-savvy residents)
  • Create a technology plan (what should our technology priorities be?)
  • Create a staff position for technology planning and monitoring
  • Procure electric lawn equipment and EVs for KCC’s fleet
  • Increase support for resident EVs
  • Infrastructure is an aspect of technology, and we need to create a proactive infrastructure and maintenance plan

Steps we might take that emphasize food:

  • Procure healthier food
  • Procure local food
  • Prevention (and better handling) of food waste

Global issues. These are issues, such as the climate and the political situation, that are beyond the control of KCC but that KCC may need to respond to.

Steps we might take that emphasize Global Issues (responding to factors outside of KCC):

  • Develop a sustainability plan (this would be incorporated as a “chapter” of the strategic plan)
  • Create a plan for water conservation
  • Create a plan for storm water management
  • Procure climate-friendly food
  • Implement climate-resilient landscaping
  • Create a program of replacing turf with pollinator-friendly native plants
  • Upgrade electrical/water infrastructure
  • Plan for possible problems with the national and global economy
  • Create a plan for resilience in a changing political environment
  • Create a plan for resilience in an era of rapid cultural change
  • Promote engagement of residents in activities and organizations outside KCC
  • Arrange for more resident involvement in planning
  • Expand the KCC board (and include more residents)
  • Arrange for a bigger role for residents in the budgeting process
  • Make an explicit decision about what part of the CCRC market we want to address
  • Change financial policy in order to recruit and support residents with “lives of service

Questions raised, without specific actions being proposed:

  • Can AI help us understand our medical data?
  • Can AI help us handle our finances?
  • How can KCC help satisfy residents’ desire for purpose in life?
  • How can KCC help provide opportunities for personal growth, for staff as well as for residents?
  • How can KCC combat loneliness/isolation?
  • How will KCC deal with the possibility that future resident populations may have larger proportions with dementia?
  • As our live are increasingly digitized, how will KCC manage the security and ownership of personal data?
  • What does being an “untied” community mean today? We are free of physical restraints and locked wards, but how much control over our data will we have, for example, if we are all using a common communication tool? Will we feel we can’t communicate freely because our words might be used against us?
  • During the Covid pandemic, many residents fell into the habit of taking food home to eat, and they continue doing so. Is this hurting our community, and what should we do about it?
  • Is there a danger of diminishing community engagement by future residents? What might be done to avoid that?
  • What is (and what should be) the roles of the “four communities”: Kendal, Crosslands, Conniston, and Cartmel? How are they related, apart from having common administrators?
  • Should KCC market itself more widely? Instead of a local geographic focus, should our marketing focus on the factors that make KCC exceptional?
  • Why is it important to be a community where residents run things, how do we promote that, and how do we ensure that future residents will maintain that tradition?
  • What can KCC do to maximize affordability?
  • To the extent we take a leadership role, how can KCC be a resource to other organizations?
  • Are we in danger of losing the philosophy and values that got us here? What can we do about that?
  • Is KCC ready to transition away from the top-down style of management that served us well during Covid? How can we move back toward the “with residents, not for residents” approach that has long been our stated goal?
  • Are new residents coming in without clear expectations of what makes KCC special and different from other CCRCs? If so, how do we fix that?

Next steps. Residents were the first group to go through this “trends and SWOT analysis” process. By the time this is published, members of the staff and administration will have done so too, and plans are being made to give prospective residents on the waiting list a similar opportunity.

It was noted in some of the reporting that there was little or no participation in the residents’ sessions by those in Personal Care, and I would encourage a further effort to get those residents’ involvement.

Diane Burfeindt, our consultant on this project, will be analyzing all of the material assembled from all of the sessions and making a report to the Strategic Planning Committee of the KCC Board.

That committee will then need to start drafting the new strategic plan, perhaps including in the plan some projects which would be part of the next budget cycle. The budgeting process starts in earnest in August, so it will be important to keep the process moving.  

Resident involvement has proved its value so far, and I hope there will be a high level of involvement in the rest of the process.