Lady-Links: Promoting Our Program

The Lady-Links program began in 2013 with a simple plan….friends visiting friends.  This straightforward plan has been successful at engaging our dear friends (those ladies in our retirement community in various stages of cognitive decline) in activities they enjoy and find meaningful.  Throughout our Lady-Links history,  we have taken various opportunities to explain how our program works and to recruit new Lady-Links, those ladies who make the visits to the dear friends.  As a result, we currently have 43 Lady-Links who are trained and ready to make visits to their assigned dear friends.

This year, promoting our program took on a new objective:  revising our leadership model to include coordinator positions.

Our community has grown considerably since 2013 and our program has grown as well, bringing about some needed changes.  Instead of being led by one administrator, her duties (at her request) are being divided and expanded so that Lady-Links will be led by a group of coordinators.  The program will remain the same…friends visiting friends…but will be able to include more dear friends with more teams of Lady-Links to make the visits.  The success of Lady-Links and the growth of our community have necessitated change, and we think a leadership model with coordinators rather than one person is a perfect solution for going forward.  We are in the process of successfully filling those coordinator positions.

We have coordinators for crafts and birthdays.

Coordinators for planning events,  identifying new dear friends and scheduling visits.

We even have an information coordinator to keep our program up to date and moving forward.

With a financial coordinator and a recruiting/training coordinator added to our leadership team, we are looking forward to a greater outreach than ever before. We only have one position to fill:  Team Coordinator.

“Friends visiting friends” with lots of love and laughter to share….that’s what defined our Lady-Links program in the beginning and will continue to do so in the future.