Page 7 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2018

OPINION: The Linkage Program will disappear!
By Alain Serkissian, Mirabel Lodge, Premiere Assisted Living Community
After an 18 very successful months, the board of supervisors will not renew this very valuable program. Without your help and advocacy, it will end in June 2018.... without anything else to replace or to follow up. Our most vulnerable elderlies will be again at risk of becoming homeless in just a few months, unless we all intervene and advocate for its renewal!
The Linkage Program was started in January of 2017 and was created and managed by our own AAA staff to prevent homelessness for our elders.
The recommendations for its creation came from Supervisor Zaine and
was created, organized and carried out very efficiently by the Area Agency
on Aging. In these moments of crisis, when housing is a major problem and concern, maintaining our elders at risk in their own home, providing them with a team of highly specialized professionals including a team of social workers, qualified providers that are offering solutions and options to their everyday challenges that would put them at risk of being homeless, is crucial! We cannot ignore these issues and this part of the population any longer! We cannot put our vulnerable elders on the side, and expect that the problem will go away on its own! We need to maintain this program in place!
The timing is crucial. We need to maintain this program in place, and the only way to do this is to be all together, as a group, as individuals or as providers, informing, educating and advocating to our supervisors to pay attention and to ultimately to renew the program. Everyone voice counts, everyone can testify, everyone can advocate, everyone can help. We need everyone help in advocating to our board.
What can YOU do? ADVOCATE!
I am open to any other options, but I propose that our own AAA advisory board drafts a letter addressed to each supervisor requesting an extension and or a renewal of the linkage program. It is time to go educate and demonstrate how important, how successful and how needed this program is!
Time is of the essence. Our county cannot afford to increase our housing deficit by penalizing our already underserved elderly community.
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