Aging in Place: Panel: Formal and Informal Supports

Ruven Liebhaber, moderator, Robert Cowherd, moderator, David Hornick, Jean Mason, Maura Parente, Vera Prosper, Dana Snyder-Grant, Steven Stadler, Karen Sternfeld

Panelists examine the advantages and challenges of aging-in-place in cohousing drawing upon their own wealth of experience and that of audience participants. Panelists discuss designs that have been successful in supporting the aging-in process as well as designs that have been unsupportive. They will suggest corrective / preventive strategies that have proven successful and analyze interventions that have failed. The goal is to identify and develop take-away strategies that others may utilize for planning new communities as well as retooling existing communities.

Ruven Liebhaber is a project development advisor, master planner, architect, group process facilitator, author, teacher and inventor. His dynamic thirty-year career path spans a broad spectrum of professional endeavors. He has completed public policy studies, senior living campus development projects and a variety of building designs. Starting in the late 1990's he has facilitated 2020 LifeVision group empowerment trainings for community planning and advance care directives.

Robert Cowherd, PhD, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, is one of the original residents of the Cambridge Cohousing. For the last decade he has been active in addressing the ongoing design and construction issues of the community, including retrofitting facilities for aging in place. He has participated in several thesis projects focusing on cohousing design, and published extensively on the role of space and culture in social communities internationally.

David Hornick is a physician who specializes in providing medical care to people of all ages who are homebound in New York’s Capital District. He has also directed a project to renovate senior apartments utilizing universal design technology. He is interested in cohousing as a partial solution for housing the rapidly increasing numbers of aging Baby-boomers. He is a graduate of Cornell University, The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the SUNY at Albany School of Public Health.

Jean K. Mason is a retired clinical psychologist who developed programs for women living alone (SHARE). She was teaching “Shared Housing” at the Boston Architectural Center when the term “cohousing” was brought to America. She and her husband, Ed Mason, were instrumental in founding Cambridge Cohousing where Ed died in 2007 surrounded by loved and loving family and friends. Jean served on the Board of Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest for-profit “fair trade” company in the US. She is the author of Intimate Tyranny (forthcoming). Her next book is an account of life in cohousing.

Maura Parente is the Coordinator of the Institute for Human Centered Design in Boston, an international educational non-profit organization committed to advancing the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages and abilities. At the Institute, Maura works with the international design community to generate awareness about human-centered design. Maura has a Masters Degree of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and specialized in designing products for the health care industry.

Vera Prosper, PhD, is a senior policy analyst for the New York State Office for the Aging and an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in Gerontology at the University at Albany, NY. Her experience over 22 years includes research, publications, policy analysis, and program development in senior housing alternatives, the living environment preferences of older people, housing and services integration, implications of demographic change, universal design, informal caregiving, outcomes measurement, and intergenerational programming.

Dana Snyder-Grant is a writer and psychotherapist, specializing in chronic illness and disability. She received her Masters Degree from Simmons College School of Social Work in 1986, after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1981. Dana is the author of Just Like Life, Only More So and Other Stories of Illness (2006), which includes tales of cohousing. She and her husband live at New View Cohousing in Acton, Massachusetts.

Steven Stadler is a founding Trustee of Cambridge At Home and the President of the Board of Trustees. He is a resident of Cambridge and graduate of Harvard College. During his career Mr. Stadler founded Grason—Stadler Company and Finanz, Inc. He also held the position of CFO and Treasurer of Genrad, Inc. (then General Radio). He has been a Director and Chairman of the Finance Committee for both Emerson Hospital and the Institute for Contemporary Art.

Karen Sternfeld has just completed her Doctor of Pharmacy degree and is a practicing pharmicist in Boston. She is an active skier, water skier, and hand cyclist. Her goal is to raise awareness of disability all around us by altering the language we use in everyday exchanges, changing the world one word at a time.