“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care”

San Francisco Towers resident Claude Lowen offered the opening reflection at this year’s LeadingAge California Annual Conference and Expo, held in Pasadena May 7-9, 2018.

I am reflecting from a somewhat different position than the more usual perspective offered at LeadingAge meetings – the outlook of an octogenarian who has been a CCRC resident for eight years.  In this, I hope that Proverbs 20:29 is correct in saying that “The glory of youths is their strength, but the majesty of old men is their gray hair.”

For CCRC residents like me, “long term” has a different meaning than it used to, but when involved in community affairs we still try to plan for others coming after us, even if we won’t directly benefit from the improvements we are working for.

Our life as residents is distinct in that it is essentially without power within the community, while we are at the same time exceptionally dependent on the spirit of obligation and stewardship of others.  Residents face uncertainties in costs of care, the future of government funding, and the outlook for skilled nursing availability.  The passage to a more powerless and dependent life has been a stormy one for some residents, and this has created some burdens for you as care providers.

We are in a time, in senior care as well as all other walks of life, when many are proposing answers, answers often not requested but nonetheless forcefully expressed, but fewer are asking the necessary questions and even fewer are willing to listen first.  As a resident member of the LeadingAge California Board of Directors, I have seen that LeadingAge has been asking the necessary questions and is listening to the answers it is hearing.

You, LeadingAge and the senior services providers of California, are the people we residents are relying on, whether because of physical or mental necessity or simply by contract.  These are demanding jobs, calling for great commitment, and often involve more stress and less compensation than employment elsewhere.  It is noteworthy that many providers have a religious foundation, including my own, which began life in the mid-nineteenth century as the Protestant Episcopal Old Ladies Home.  It has since relaxed its admission policy.

I have looked for a pithy saying to close my reflection, and the quotation, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care,” attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, fits the challenges and obligations assumed by LeadingAge and the entire elder care community.  A more personal aspiration was my mother’s frequently expressed measure of a person – wisdom.  For her, the measure of success was not wealth, public acclaim or personal popularity, but wisdom, and her judgment that a person had no wisdom was a severe rebuke.  I believe that the efforts of everyone at LeadingAge and all of you at our communities are meeting that test, and hope that you will continue to strive to do so.  I and all residents of our communities are relying on you and I am confident that you will.