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To the staff and friends at Action Pact: You helped us start our journey, and accompanied us to this day. Neither our transformation nor this Toolkit could have been done nearly so well without your partnership. Your leadership is extraordinary. Your magazine Culture Change Now and website of the same name have educated many world-wide. With a staff of culture change experts supported by educators, writers, artists and a great videographer, your skill set is unique and ideal. You have consistently given the field of long-term care the transformation tools it needs. Your voice has quietly, yet forcefully prodded us all to become what we are truly called to be.
Thanks to my mother and father who inspired me to commit my life to elders. My father’s quiet wisdom and awareness are constant, guiding forces in my life. I feel blessed that the Household Model came in to being in time for him. My mother gave her children tenacity, courage and intolerance for social injustice. I beg her forgiveness for not seeing the injustice of her long-term care experience before she died. Her painful road became my difficult path to personal discovery.
Thank you, LaVrene. You are an amazing friend, colleague, change agent and visionary. Co-authoring a book with a friend is a little like wallpapering with your spouse. If you survive it, the relationship only grows stronger. We passed the test.
Lastly, I thank my family. The additional energy and time required to write it were, in large part, granted and supported by the home front. Thank you Sally for your understanding, patience and constant support during your own time of loss. I love you.
To our ten-year-old son, Ben, you have been a trooper during the many absences required for writing this book. You know how much I love you.
I asked Ben, a voracious reader, to review Chapter One. He got about half a page down, put it aside and said, “No dragons, no dragon slayers...it’s boring Dad.”
When you are older Ben, I hope you will see there are dragons in this book; that our only real hope for change rests with the dragon slayers who read it.
Thank you, Meadowlark Hills staff members for your courage, heart, commitment and generosity of spirit. As individuals and part of the team, you are living examples of how societal change occurs when people align around values and vision, and commit to the required actions.
You lived the changes from the beginning, and in so doing are a testament to the industry’s highest principles. If this book were a play, you would be its scriptwriters. Ultimately, the toll taken on each of you will be forgotten, but the gifts that come from leading others to a new way will endure forever.
I am so grateful for the personal inspiration of elders and staff that I have met across the US. And especially for those who took the first steps toward Households with Action Pact: Bigfork Valley, Meadowlark Hills, Nielson Place, Tealwood and Lenawee. You have proved that true home can happen in the Household Model.
A special thanks to all my friends in Australia but especially to Sarah, Peter and Dawn MacKenzie of Melbourne and Rhonda Peploe of Perth. You have welcomed me into your homes as your elders have welcomed me into their households.
Thanks Steve. You have proved The Household Model is home and sustainable. And the side benefit is that all those great conversations of ours over the years have not remained static in time – they’ve become a book!
I thank my family and dear friends, embedded not only in my heart, but luckily also in Action Pact. Everywhere I turn I am supported. You all have passed me by in your knowledge and skills, but find the energy to listen and counsel me and even find my lost keys. You are my inspiration and my motivation.
Thank you Pat, Brendan, Chris, Patty, Keith, Kristine, Coletta, Steph, Megan, Linda, Peggy, Deb, Mary Ellen, Mike, Paula, Andy and Michaele.
And Mike, thank you for inspiring our life plan – we’ll be old together, and it will be home, wherever we happen to live.
- LaVrene
- Steve
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