On the morning of Thursday, July 10, a motley and eager gathering of seniors, caregivers and other locals convened at Unwind, a venue space on Central Avenue, for a donut breakfast to discuss ideas of how to brighten someone’s day.
The following day was National Cheer Up the Lonely Day, during which a similar group had gathered at Camellia Walk, an assisted living facility in Evans, to put what they came up to practice.
The first of these two community events was coordinated in preparation for the other, said Jeanine Lewis Canales, founder of Seniors Helping Seniors Mid-South Georgia, the CSRA branch of an in-home caregiving service with a unique model that entails hiring and training primarily other seniors as support workers.
“It might be… dropping off some used magazines, or making an appointment with them and calling them saying, ‘Hey, I’m coming by to see you tomorrow, what time are you available?’” said Canales. “It might be, ‘I’m going to pick up a bouquet of flowers, and I’m going to just drop them by. It could even just be a phone call or sending someone a funny text message. But really, at the end of the day, we wanted to give people the inspiration and the positivity and the energy to go out and be a blessing.”
In her 20-year tenure as a marketing executive that has included developing initiatives for brands such as Coca-Cola and Bumble Bee Foods, Canales, an Augusta native, has always had an affinity for what she calls “love marks,” brands that have proven especially emotionally evocative.
“Brands that when you see it, you feel something,” she said.
Looking to be closer to her mother amid the COVID pandemic, and to provide her son a childhood closer to home, Canales and her husband Juan moved to Evans from Boca Raton, Fl. Then came time to consider what would be her next step professionally. Seniors Helping Seniors “checked every box.”
“If I want to live with intention, and I want to be back in Augusta, and I want family to be together… how do I use everything I’ve been blessed with?” Canales said. “How do I use the marketing that I have studied and performed to help create brands? How do I leverage the goodness and that God has put in my life in so many other ways and allow those things to merge into a business that will bless the community and bless my family?”
Founders Kiran and Philip Yocom launched Seniors Helping Seniors in 1998, opening it to franchising in 2006. The service has a network of more than 200 partners across some 38 states, including South Carolina. The Mid-South Georgia branch expands its availability to Richmond, Columbia, Burke, McDuffie, Baldwin and Putnam counties.
To highlight the growing need for caregivers, Canales cites an estimation by the U.S. Census Bureau that more than 20% of Georgia’s population will be 60 or older by the year 2030, and a report by the national Department of Health and Human Services that almost 70% of retirees will requires some kind of long-term care.
“There are seven caregivers for every 1,000 choices. In Georgia, we lead the problem in terms of there being a caregiver shortage,” Canales said. “What that means is we’ve got to start thinking differently about where the workforce is going to come from.”
The Seniors Helping Seniors model, she said, often helps its usually older workers not only financially, but by nurturing a sense of purpose.
“What you end up with is an overall stronger community made for people who are doing honestly what we’re supposed to do… just taking care of my neighbor,” she said. “By making these paid roles, paid positions, I figure all I’m doing is catalyzing kindness. When you catalyze it, you get energy to move it forward, make was going to happen, happen faster.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
