In the grantmaking world there is a cynical fear that as soon as the money is gone, the work will be forgotten, everyone will move on to the next grant, and there will be no lasting value. Because, with a few exceptions, the joint American Society on Aging/National Council on Aging (ASA/NCOA) meeting has not been a major platform for the Foundation’s work, I wasn’t expecting to discover reassurance there. So it was a special pleasure to see the deep engagement of so many at the meeting in geriatric care issues core to the Foundation’s mission.
Because the ASA/NCOA audience is such a hotbed of geriatric social work, I expected presentations by the New York Academy of Medicine’s Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education and the National Association of Social Workers. Many of the Foundation’s long-time friends also participate in the Atlantic Philanthropies–funded National Coalition on Care Coordination (N3C), which was also strongly represented in multiple sessions.
But a delightful surprise was a presentation I saw on my last morning by Steve Bartels of the Dartmouth Institute, describing the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Older Adult Targeted Capacity Expansion (TCE) grants program. I knew that in the late 1990s SAHMSA had funded a major project, PRISMe, examining the provision of mental health care to older adults in primary care settings at the same time that we were funding IMPACT, our primary-care based depression treatment initiative. At the same time, the National Institute of Mental Health was funding PROSPECT, three similar trials of collaborative care for the primary care treatment of depression in older adults. However, since then I had pretty much lost track of SAMHSA’s efforts in geriatric care.
From Steve Bartels, I learned that under TCE, SAHMSA has granted more than $30 million in grants to state agencies to put in place evidence-based services for improved mental health care of older adults. I was pleased to discover that Project IMPACT and another depression care program we funded, Healthy Ideas, are among the evidence-based models that the TCE initiative and its technical assistance center are offering.
With our support, NCOA’s Center for Healthy Aging developed Healthy Ideas over six years ago as part of the Foundation’s project on evidence-based health promotion. Last week at the meeting, I saw plenty of evidence that three of the four programs developed under that initiative, Healthy Ideas, Healthy Moves, and Healthy Eating, were still going strong. In addition to SAHMSA’s interest in Healthy Ideas, June Simmons of the Partners in Care Foundation presented on Healthy Moves and Rob Schreiber of Hebrew Senior Life on Healthy Eating.
It was very reassuring to know that these programs have grown legs and can walk free without our help. Seeing the dedicated leaders of these efforts continue their work and lend their support to these great projects is a fantastic renewal of faith.
"If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours. If it does not come back, it was never meant to be."