Recharging Retirees in Retirement Communities

Cha cha ching! Can you hear the sound of cash in your resident's pockets? At my "sister-community" they held a Gold Rush Party, and residents brought their unwanted gold in and walked away with money. They will be hosting another party in October and those interested from my community will attend. The portion of revenue that goes to the community has been earmarked for a tree project that will impact both communities. Read all about it in the Sun Sentinel newspaper article " High gold prices tempt selling ." Update: we have had the event with a local gold buying company  http://www.atlanticgoldnow.com/Home.html at our community twice now. It is worth doing in your community as a fund raiser. Find the right person to come to your community and it will feel good to the residents who are interested in selling their gold and silver. 

　 In my original article about showing movies in your retirement community , I spoke about the basics of planning your movie schedule and offered movie suggestions to show in your retirement community. In this article, I will address the rest of the movie story. As the activities director my goal is to get the residents OUT of their apartment! I don't remember who it was that talked me into showing the movies in their apartments to start with.... but I wish that I never started it. It has been years now since Fridays have been movie nights and residents have the choice of watching from their home or from their apartment. But, after Labor Day, that is about to change! Yeah!! I started a Monday Movie Matinee feature on my calendar during the summer months last year. This year, it really caught on in the community and they were well attended. I offered free popcorn and punch to those who came to the show. I also showed movies that I felt were the "cream of the crop&q

As we say goodbye to summer we will be having a Coney Island Theme Party in my retirement community. My thoughts about this have been buzzing around for a few months now, but in the end I've decided to go with the KISS method. Keep It Simple Stupid, or Silly as I like to say, since I don't think simplicity is stupid or anyone who chooses to do things simply is stupid. That being said, let me share with you what I'll be doing in the community for our Coney Island night. First, of course is that I went on-line to see what the place is all about since I've never been there. I did find a few websites that were helpful. I believe that what the residents would remember about Coney Island and what it is now are different. So I read about the history of the theme park also. From the websites, I was able to "grab" a few pictures that I will enlarge and post around at the event. In my community, we have booths that are three sided that our maintenance departme

This week, I started making the final plans for my New Year's Eve party for the independent living residents in my CCRC ( Continuing Care Retirement Community ). The residents like to have a dance, so that is what I do each year. The trick is to make it a bit different each year. Depending on the residents in the community, sometimes our dance is right after dinner, from 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. and sometimes it is 9:30 p.m. until 12:30 p.m. Check out one of my first blog postings ever when I talked about New Year's Eve last year. This week I spoke with a talent agent that I use from time to time to arrange my musical entertainment. I like to use an agent for New Year's Eve because I want to be assured that I will have someone there that night. It has happened before that I book a performer and he or she finds a better paying job and comes up with an excuse to cancel our arrangement (even with a contract in hand!).  I know that with the agent that I pay a bit more, but

It is August and in my retirement community, that means a dog show. (See the article on Dog Days of Summer on this blog for the details.) I was trying to figure out how I could involve the audience that will be at the dog show in the voting process, when it dawned on me... technology! One of the cool things about the company that I work for is that I have other communities, a regional office, and a corporate office to get resources from for my programs. I saw that our corporate culinary department purchased a voting system. It is called Turning Point System . The system provides each resident with a hand held device that responds to a laptop that is loaded with the proper software. For the dog show, I will give each audience member a list of possible awards to be given out at the end of the show. (I will have more titles to win then there will be dogs in the show so that the dogs have a chance of fitting into an appropriate category.)  Using the system, the residents in the audi