The Howard County
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F O C U S
VOL.9, NO.4
F O R
P E O P L E
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A single mother of two, Burba used her own financial resources to fund her model for the program, which she called Winter Growth (“winter” for the last phase of life, “growth” for the continued potential for older adults).
APRIL 2019
I N S I D E …
PHOTO COURTESY OF WINTER GROWTH
Used her own savings
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Pioneer changed attitudes, lives By Robert Friedman Forty years ago, Marge Burba revved up her Cougar station wagon each morning to pick up five older adults and bring them to her two-story home in Olney, where the living room and kitchen were turned over to them as part of a program meant to keep them engaged during the day. At a time when a sociological theory that withdrawing from society was both natural and acceptable late in life — thus a time when many older adults were being plopped into unenlightened nursing homes — Burba was gathering practical proof of her thesis for a master’s degree in gerontology from Antioch University’s Columbia branch. In her thesis, she had asked, “Can a day program be an effective model to prevent disengagement in older adults?” “Based on what I learned in my gerontology classes,” Burba told the Beacon, “I developed a program of age-appropriate lunch menus, therapeutic exercises — including exercises and field trips — client and family counseling, and transportation.” Her program looked to psychologist Erik Erikson’s theory of ego integrity, which said that when growth is denied to older persons, despair takes over. The program would show, Burba said, that “in the right environment, even with illness and disability, older adults could successfully grow in integrity and overall life satisfaction.”
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ARTS & STYLE Marge Burba founded the Winter Growth adult day care program in her home four decades ago. Her nonprofit company has since expanded to two locations serving more than 300 regular participants, and added assisted living communities in Columbia and Olney. She is pictured here with a llama that visited Winter Growth through a collaboration with 4-H.
The program offered counseling and activities to the participants in Burba’s home. When the number of people kept growing and soon reached 19, she found a new meeting place in a Sandy Spring community center. In those early days, which Burba called “the honeymoon years,” she did the cook-
ing, the driving and the overseeing of the programs. Over the years, Burba devised further programs “to tackle a service that would help make ‘the sunset’ of people’s lives, as the Japanese say, ‘as beautiful as is the sunrise.’” See WINTER GROWTH, page 35
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