When Lady-Links started in 2013, we had one dear friend diagnosed with Alzheimer’s whom we visited. Our goal was to engage her in activities that she enjoyed and could successfully complete. Our numbers both in Lady-Links and in dear friends have grown since then, but our vision has remained the same…helping our dear friends link to life through love and laughter during our friendship visits. Some of our Lady-Links and our dear friends have moved, others have passed away, others have circumstances that changed but since we began, 79 Lady-Links have been trained serving 19 dear friends.
This takes dedicated Lady-Links, working behind the scenes as well as at the visits, to make our program run smoothly. We attend training and seminars.
We plan and prepare, scheduling our visits two months in advance.
We work on preparing crafts, making sure that at the visits our dear friends will be able to easily assemble their portion.
We promote awareness of Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.
We do all of this so that we can enrich the lives of the sweet ladies we call dear friends by helping them keep “linked” to the world around them. And in doing so, we have found that our lives are enriched as well.
We are grateful for the support of our community, our families and our friends.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to share about our Lady-Links program.
Our focus has been on our visits to our dear friends. Once that was established, we began receiving inquiries about our program. As a result, we found the best way to explain about what we do was to begin this Lady-Links website. Our mission for writing the posts has been to provide education about Alzheimer’s and other related types of dementia, and to inspire those with friends or loved ones affected by this disease to continue to engage them in activities which will help preserve skills. In addition, we hope to encourage other communities to start their own Lady-Links program. The six years of Lady-Links visits have been beneficial for all of us, and we enjoy our time spent with our dear friends.
Since we began, over 1,975 Lady-Links visits have been made, representing 5,925 hours spent at visits. This does not include the hours spent in training, scheduling, preparation work or planning. We view each hour as an investment in love because we place significant value in each friendship we’ve made through our Lady-Links program.
Lady-Links: Linking Love and Laughter as we begin our 7th year of friendship visits. Thanks to all of you who have made this possible.
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