Grant funding allows elder care nonprofit to branch out
Shannon Shea, founding executive director of Elder Love USA, has made it her mission to make in-home care accessible and affordable for seniors. She can quickly recall the impetus behind her decision to help others, which sprang from leaving her job in sales and going on to receive her bachelor’s in gerontological social work.
“I would go into people’s homes and try to figure out what resources and services I could connect them to,” she recalls of interning. “And even though they lived in very affluent neighborhoods, these mostly older widowed gals had no family, no kids and they still have to pay their property taxes, their medicine, their groceries, their light bill and they didn’t have the extra $40 to $50 an hour minimum to hire Homestead or some of these bigger for-profit organizations.
“I realized that that individual basically needs an adopt-a-granddaughter program,” she adds. “Somebody who can just come in once a week for an hour or two, change the fitted sheets, take out the trash, do the laundry, open jars, scrub and clean and do stuff that ‘Betty’ can’t really do anymore but she’s perfectly safe at home as long as she has that little bit of extra support.”
More ideas sprang from these interning days, and soon enough Elder Love USA was born. Today, the nonprofit provides in-home care at a reduced rate, thanks to a combination of client support, partnerships with managed care partners, various fundraisers, individual donations, sponsorships and other grants.
A recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation through the Riverside County ARPA Fund, in fact, has given the nonprofit a way to hire a client care coordinator, a position Shea says was greatly missing in the organization.
“We desperately needed someone to be in charge of the continuity between answering the phone and having a client need care and then hiring employees and doing all the onboarding,” she says. “The role would also connect the caregivers to the clients. It was like this one position that a bunch of us were kind of all trying to do, and it was chaos. So, that funding helped. It made everything seamless and fabulous.”
Elder Love USA provides an initial consultation to determine if the services are a right fit. Once a client is onboarded, the nonprofit requires a two-hour minimum for caregiving clients. There are no long-term contracts.
Several of the organization’s programs stand out. VetAssist, for instance, provides assistance to wartime veterans or spouses of a wartime veterans through the V.A.’s “Aid and Attendance” benefit. It’s ideal for individuals who meet certain medical and financial requirements.
Additionally, Elder Love USA has strong partnerships with Fry’s, Food4Less and Ralphs, which allow customers to donate to the nonprofit directly. Meanwhile, car donations help the organization fund vital programs and services that support its mission.
Shea is quick to note that she’s “very transparent” about the organization’s pricing.
“We’re still way less than $40 and $50 an hour,” she says. “We’re $28 an hour and we have a two-hour minimum, which is still a lot better than most. But my goal is to get it down to $10 or $15 an hour.”
Looking ahead, Shea hopes to grow and make a deeper impact.
“I would definitely like locals to know we exist,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been talking about it all day long for nine years. There’s so many people I run into, but I just want people to know about us. We are the only nonprofit caregiving agency, and we want to help as many people as we can.”
Learn more at Elder Love USA at elderloveusa.org.
Inland Empire Community Foundation works to strengthen Inland Southern California through philanthropy. Visit iegives.org for more information.
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