Pamela Hildebrand and Anita Nugent feel as close as any family members to one another.
“Pam is the sister I never had,” Nugent said.
“She’s the sister I always wanted,” Hildebrand said of Nugent.
Both are residents of the same senior housing apartments in Columbia, and they’re enthusiastic clients of Aging Best, the area agency on aging.
According to the National Council on Aging, more than 17 million adults aged 65 and older are economically insecure, a reality that affects minority seniors at a higher rate. Hildebrand agreed that today’s seniors face many challenges.
“It’s scary as hell to be a senior,” Hildebrand said. “There’s a lot of seniors that lay awake at night worrying about how they are going to make it through. And if it wasn’t for Aging Best, I couldn’t manage.”
Aging Best is one the area agencies on aging that sprouted from the Older Americans Act of 1965, part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs. The law created the Administration on Aging; the area agencies on aging are part of its network.
Overseen by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, there are ten of the agencies in Missouri. Aging Best covers nineteen counties in mid-Missouri with approximately nintey full-time employees.
“When people find Aging Best, they generally find us because of nutrition,” noted Candi Bockenstedt, the agency’s director of special programs. “They come into one of the [nutrition activity] centers, or they are requesting home-delivered meals. We deliver meals in all 19 counties and to anyone that is homebound.”
Hildebrand and Nugent are among the agency’s grateful meal recipients. “Aging Best provides me food,” Hildebrand said. “And it’s good food. It’s healthy food. One of the hardest things as a senior is food, because it’s so expensive to buy fresh foods for one person.”
“It’s scary as hell to be a senior. There’s a lot of seniors that lay awake at night worrying about how they are going to make it through. And if it wasn’t for Aging Best, I couldn’t manage.”
— Pamela Hildebrand
The cost of food and other essentials has certainly shot up, and Bockenstedt and her staff are sensitive to their clients’ budgetary dilemmas. “Our client care specialists answer the phone and help kind of triage different people’s needs and try to figure out if they’re eligible for things” she said. That includes such services as farmers market vouchers and help with Medicare enrollment.
“Our client care specialists can help with any kind of application assistance, whether it’s Medicaid or food stamps or help with enrolling for Medicare or picking a new plan,” she said. Their expertise extends to navigating the changes to Medicare’s Part D plan for prescriptions as well. “We’ve been known to save people $800 a month in pharmacy expenses,” Bockenstedt commented. “And that’s not just a one-time thing. That happens all the time that we’re able to help people.”
Doing More With Less
It may be that Aging Best is so good at dealing with its clients’ economic stresses because the agency faces financial challenges of its own.
“We’re struggling, like all the nonprofits,” Bockenstedt said. “We have cut staff. We haven’t cut programs. We see the need, and we fill the need.”
One way Aging Best does that is by bringing together the services of other agencies. For example, it partners with existing transportation services to match people with them. Bockenstedt recalled one typical case in which Aging Best was able to find a way to get a client in Columbia to a doctor’s appointment in Sedalia and back home. Medical transportation can be arranged for Aging Best clients to anywhere in the state, she said.
Bockenstedt noted that Aging Best fills gaps when other nonprofits aren’t able to. Among its gap-filling efforts, Aging Best:
- Replaces air conditioners for seniors
- Finds cleaning services for their homes or apartments
- Provides seniors with hospice services
A more yawning gap is housing, which Bockenstedt said is too expensive and hard for many seniors to find. At a recent conference, she learned that people over the age of 60 will be the largest unhoused population by 2030, a statistic that astounded her. To help prevent that prediction from coming true in this neck of the woods, Aging Best helps individuals find housing, too.
Not Only the Needy Have Needs
Of course, while many seniors experience financial difficulties, not all of them do. In fact, recent data from the U.S. Federal Reserve places the median net worth of seniors aged 65 to 74 at $409,900 and their average net worth at $1.8 million. That compares favorably to the 45-54 age group, which has a median net worth of $247,200 and an average net worth of $975,800.
None of the services Aging Best provides are income-based. They’re available to anyone 60 or older and for grandparents caring for grandchildren 55 and older, Bockenstedt said.
She highlighted Give 5, “which is a program for anyone who has retired, to match them with nonprofits in their community, to be able to reconnect.”
“We find that after you retire, you kind of lose your identity a little bit and sometimes you feel disengaged from your community.”
— Candi Bockenstedt
By connecting seniors with local nonprofits, “it’s kind of peeling back the curtain, kind of a Wizard of Oz-type deal, because you get to see how your community runs from behind the scenes,” she said of the program.
Currently available only in Columbia, Jefferson City, and Lake of the Ozarks, Give 5 will be expanding into the entire Aging Best area in the fall. “So that’s a really good program for anyone who’s retired to find a place, to find their tribe,” Bockenstedt said.
Sisters (and Brothers) Are Doing It for Themselves
Speaking of tribes, while the seniors in the apartment complex where Hildebrand and Nugent live appreciate the services Aging Best offers, that doesn’t mean they don’t take the initiative in their own lives.
“We call and check on each other,” said Hildebrand, who has diabetes and gets around in a motorized wheelchair. “We do welfare checks.”
From 3 to 5 each afternoon, many of the residents gather in the building’s community room.
“We all sit there and solve the world’s problems,” Hildebrand said. “I call it an extended family.”
“It’s keeping us all a little active,” added Nugent.
That self-help ethos is also evident in Hildebrand’s work with the Silver Haired Legislature, of which she is the current chair.
The advocacy group develops proposals to benefit seniors and lobbies the legislature for their enactment. “How do you get the resources to the people in need?” asked Hildebrand. “Those things are crucial to me.”
Missouri is currently in the process of developing a new Master Plan on Aging. A draft master plan is to be developed by the end of 2025. The goal is a ten-year framework to empower older adults and individuals with disabilities and support senior communities. Another goal is to allow individuals to live safely and independently in the environment they choose.
Though she has a disability, Hildebrand isn’t finished with her advocacy work.
“My journey’s not done,” she said. “If I’m going to be here, I’m going to be active and I’m going to be busy.”
