Caregiving service Seniors Helping Seniors Mid-Georgia hosted its grand opening, Tuesday afternoon, at its new Summerville location.
Owner Jeanine Lewis Canales welcomed a host of supporters and staff, alongside the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce, to cut the ribbon on the office, a commercial building off Wrightsboro Road sporting a warm, cottage-like interior after two months of renovation.
Canales introduced the Middle Georgia branch of Seniors Helping Seniors to the CSRA in July at a community event at Unwind on Central Avenue, explaining its unique caregiving model in which seniors are trained to care for other seniors.
The Mid-South branch currently has some 20 caregivers on staff between the Augusta and Eatonton offices, with a goal of garnering more than 100 in the CSRA.
“We believe that good people know good people,” said Canales, speaking on the firm’s unconventional approach to recruitment that utilizes community bonds, such as through word of mouth, or reaching out to churches. “We’re going to place rack cards in churches and just say to congregation members, ‘if you want to do work that allows you to invest your spiritual gifts in a way that has purpose and make money at the same time, apply for Seniors Helping Seniors.”
Canales refers to the enterprise as a “ministry,” emphasizing its central value of caring—“just another form of loving your neighbor”—and alludes to a “continuum of joy,” one of the firm’s six core values, alongside compassion with conviction, reciprocal dignity, integrity that leads, maturity as a virtue and, of course, the calling of caring.
“A lot of times, people think that joy is something that’s temporary, that it’s a state or a situational thing,” she said. “What we’re saying is that joy can be experienced at any point in your life, even if it is your last days, and that we as caregivers should be part of making sure that you can experience that joy… that it is part of what God has given to us, and sometimes we just strip it away ourselves. But that’s what we’re here, to put joy back in matter what your stage in aging is.”
Seniors Helping Seniors Augusta is located at 1327 Troupe St.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering general reporting for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com
