Area Agency on Aging Serving Buncombe, Henderson, Madison & Transylvania Counties
Volume IV, Issue 4
Advocacy, Assistance, Answers on Aging
November 2009 - January 2010
Efforts save Project CARE Dickens, who led seniors’ push, retires As printed in the Asheville Citizen-Times on October 7, 2009, Jordan Schrader
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awmakers, lobbyists and advocates trying to get funding for their favorite program into the state budget this year had a minefield to walk through. But a program called Project CARE emerged unscathed. Legislators decided to preserve the program, which helps caregivers take breaks from otherwise constant attention to their loved ones with Alzheimer’s disease. Those who convinced legislators of the program’s worthiness include the N.C. Senior Tar Heel Legislature and its leader, Speaker Charles Dickens, who lives in the Riceville community near Asheville. Dickens steps down today from his term at the helm of the Senior Tar Heel Legislature, which lobbies on behalf of seniors and informs them about goingson at the General Assembly. He says the group had some successes despite an economy that left legislators scrambling to cut and tax their way out of a multibillion-dollar budget gap. “Considering the pressure that the members of the General Assembly were under, I think senior programs fared reasonably well,” Dickens said. He cautions, though, that simply holding funding steady won’t be good enough in future years, as baby boomers retire and North Carolina contends with an elderly population that, according to a study by the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, is set to double by 2030. Buncombe County is expected to add more than 28,000 seniors by then. Dickens and other members of the senior group will keep pushing legislators to aid elders. Among their goals this year that failed to win support: more money for senior centers — which faced a cut instead — and exempting poor seniors from more of their property taxes.
Dennis Streets, Director of the NC Division of Aging and Adult Services, presented a certificate from Governor Bev Perdue to Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens spoke to seniors outside the NC Legislature about the Extra Help and Medicare Savings Program after the October STHL meeting in Raleigh. For more info about Extra Help, contact Barbara Hinshaw at 251-6622.
Dickens, 74, retired to Asheville after a career at the National Science Foundation and a stint in the White House science office. He joined the Senior Tar Heel Legislature in 2005 and became speaker in 2007. Jack Roberts, a delegate to the group from Mars Hill, said Dickens “took a kind of lackluster organization” and turned it into an influential force in Raleigh. “If not for groups like this, then who would be speaking up for these people?” Roberts said. Dickens arrived to find Project CARE — Caregiver Alternatives to Running on Empty, which had started in Western North Carolina and expanded to Charlotte and elsewhere — about to run out of federal funding. He attended meetings around the state and lobbied the legislature. Now in 21 counties, the program’s stand-in caregivers offer respite to people like Delores Stroup’s mother, who otherwise was taking care of her husband nearly all the time. “It could be to go to the beauty shop. It could be to go to the grocery store,” said Stroup, a delegate from Brevard. “She could just go out in her yard to work on her flowers.” A caregiver in Swain County uses her respite time for trips to a fitness center where she keeps her muscles strong enough to pick up her husband when he falls, Dickens said. Lawmakers decided last year to start funding the program. This year, they shuffled funding sources but matched the amount from 2008, $500,000 for each of the next two years. “We were able to make a great contribution, I think, at the time when it mattered,” Dickens said.
Website: www.landofsky.org/aging
Phone: 828-251-6622