Rob Kennedy mixed with about a dozen other people in a community room in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.
The room, decorated with an under-the-sea theme, had a balloon arch with streamers to look like jellyfish and a cloud of clear balloons that mimic ocean bells.
Kennedy comes to this memory café twice a month since he diagnosed Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s in his late 1950s.
Everyone here has a certain memory loss or is a caregiver for someone with memory loss.
Participants colored on worksheets with an underwater theme. They drank coffee and returned to the breakfast bar for seconds on cakes.
A quick trivia round let everyone work at work.
“We start with only small trivia – many of us cannot answer any of the questions,” Kennedy said laughing.
“We all have a good time to go around,” he added. “You know, we try to make it all fun.”
The northeastern Pennsylvania Memory Cafe Kennedy is one of the more than 600 in the entire country, according to Dementia Friendly America. The meetings for people with cognitive disorders and their carers are relatively cheap and easy to run – the only costs are often a small rental costs for the space.
Since national and local health departments try to understand nationally what the potential loss of $ 11 billion in federal health financing will mean for the services they can offer their communities, the organizers of the memory café believe that their work can become even more important.
Losing memory, and other things
Kennedy’s diagnosis led him to retire, so that a decades of career were terminated as a software engineer at the University of Scranton.
He recommends memory cafés to other people with dementia and their families.
“If they don’t come to a place like this, they do themselves a bad service. You have to go outside and see people laughing.”
The memory cafés that he attends happen twice a month. They gave him a goal, said Kennedy, and help him deal with negative emotions surrounding his diagnosis.
“I came in and I was miserable,” said Kennedy. “I am coming in now and it is as if it is family, it is a big, extensive family. I meet them. I meet their partners. I meet their children. So it’s really fun.”
More than 6 million people in the US have been diagnosed with a form of dementia. The diagnosis can be stressful about relationships, especially with family members who are the primary care providers.
A new report from the Alzheimer’s Association showed that 70% of care providers reported that coordinating care is stressful. Socializing can also become more difficult after diagnosis.
“One thing I have heard time and time again from people who come to our memory café has” all our friends have disappeared, “said Beth Soltzberg, a social worker with Jewish family and children’s service of Greater Boston, where she leads the Alzheimer’s and related dementia family support program.
The absorption of care providers is some memory cafés distinguishes from other programs that people with cognitive impairment serve, such as daycare for adults. Memory cafés do not offer formal therapies. In a memory café, together support and social supports are the well -being of participants. And that support is for the patient and their caregiver – because both can experience social isolation and need after a diagnosis.
A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Public Health indicated that even online memory cafés offered social support for both patients and their family members during the Pandemie.
“A memory café is a cafe that acknowledges that some of the customers can have cognitive impairment here, some may not,” said Jason Karlawish, professor Geriatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania and the CO director of the Penn Memory Center.
Karlawish regularly recommends memory cafés to his patients, partly because they also benefit healthcare providers.
“The caregiver patient Dyade, I often find, has achieved a certain degree of connection and pleasure by doing things together,” said Karlawish. “For many that is a very satisfying experience, because dementia reforms relationships.”
“That socialization really helps to alleviate the stress they feel by being a caregiver,” said Kyra O’Brien, a neurologist who also teaches Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We know that patients have a better quality of life when their care providers have less stress.”
An affordable way to tackle a growing problem
As the population gets older, the number of available caregivers decreases, according to the Aarp Public Policy Institute. The report showed that the number of potential care providers for an individual 80 or older will decrease considerably by 2050.
In 2024, the Alzheimer’s Association issued a report in which a jump in dementia -cases in the US was projected of an estimated 6.9 million people aged 65 or older who currently live with Alzheimer’s disease in 2060. It mainly attributed this increase to the aging or 196.
Since cases of memory loss are expected to rise, the Trump administration tries to lower billions of health expenditure. Because memory cafés are not dependent on federal dollars, they can become an even more important part of the continuum of care for people with memory loss and their loved ones.
“We are fighting a number of pretty important medicaid cuts at congress level,” says Georgia Goodman, director of the Medicaid policy for leadingage, a national non -profit network of services for people as they get older. “Medicaid is a program that does not necessarily pay for memory cafés, but to ensure that the continuum of long -term care and the financing mechanisms that support the support are robust and remain available to people will be the key.”
The non -profit Memorylane Care Services has two memory cafés in Toledo, Ohio. They are almost free to work because they take place at locations that do not require payment, according to Salli Bollin, the executive director.
“That really helps from a cost position, from the point of view of financing,” said Bollin.
One of the memory cafés takes place once a month in a local coffee shop. The other meets in the Toledo Museum of Art. Memorylane Care Services offers the museum employees training in dementia sensitivity, so that they can lead tours for the participants in the memory café.
The memory café that Rob Kennedy attends in Pennsylvania costs around $ 150 a month to walk, according to the guest organization, the gathering place.
“This is a love work,” said board member Paula Baillie, referring to the volunteers who run the memory café. “The fact that they give up time – they acknowledge that this is important.”
The monthly budget goes to crafts, books, coffee, snacks and some utilities for the two -hour meetings. Local foundations offer subsidies that help cover those costs.
Although memory cafés are cheap and not dependent on federal financing, they may be confronted with indirect obstacles due to the recent cuts of the Trump administration.
Organizers are concerned that the loss of federal funds could negatively influence the guest institutions, such as libraries and other community spaces.
Memory Cafe Hotspot: Wisconsin
According to Dementia Friendly America, at least 39 states have recently organized memory cafés. Wisconsin has the most – more than 100.
The State has a strong infrastructure focused on memory care, which has to run its memory cafés, regardless of what happens at federal level, according to Susan McFadden, a professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Ohkosh. She was co-founder of the Fox Valley Memory project, which supervises 14 memory cafés.
“They had surgery on the base, they had surgery with a fairly small budgets and a lot of goodwill,” she said.
Since 2013, Wisconsin has also had a unique network for dementia care, with dementia care specialists funded by the state for every province and federally recognized tribe in Wisconsin. The specialists help to connect individuals with cognitive impairment with community resources, strengthening the presence of the memory café.
McFadden heard about memory cafés in 2011 for the first time, before they were popular in the United States. She conducted research into memory and leses on aging.
McFadden put his hand out of memory cafés in the United Kingdom, where the model was already popular and well connected. Memory café organizers invited her to visit and observe them personally, so she planned an overseas about abroad with her husband.
Their tour skipped the typical tourist hotspots and brought them to more modest environments.
“We saw ecclesiastical cellars and senior center dining rooms and accompanying dining rooms,” she said. “That is really the core of memory cafés for me. It is hospitality. It takes contact with people you don’t know and welcomes, and that is what they have done for us.”
After her journey, MCFADDEN started to apply for subsidies and scouting locations that were able to organize memory cafés in Wisconsin.
She opened her first in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 2012, just over a year after her transforming trip to the UK
Nowadays she points interested people to a national directory of memory cafés organized by Dementia Friendly America. The Memory Cafe Alliance of the organization also offers training modules – developed by MCFADDEN and her colleague Anne Basting – to help people establish cafés in their own communities, wherever they are.
“They are not that hard to set up; they are not expensive,” said Mcfadden. “It does not require the legislative power to do a memory café. Community involvement is needed.”
|
|
