What The Elderwise Way Taught Me About Building EngAGE Beverly
A Different Approach: What The Elderwise Way Taught Me About Building EngAGE Beverly
A reflection on the book by Sandy Sabersky and Ruth Neuwald Falcon, and how its spirit-centered philosophy is shaping the community we're building.
Every once in a while, you read a book and feel like the author has been quietly listening to your half-formed thoughts and handing them back to you, more clearly worded than you could have managed yourself. The Elderwise Way: A Different Approach to Life with Dementia by Sandy Sabersky and Ruth Neuwald Falcon did exactly that. It is now one of the deepest influences on the community we're building at EngAGE Beverly.
Elderwise was co-founded by Sandy Sabersky in her Seattle home in 1997, and what has grown there over more than twenty years is not an adult day program in the conventional sense. It is a practice, a philosophy, a way of being with people who are living with dementia that begins from a fundamentally different starting point than most of what passes for memory care in this country. I want to walk through the ideas in the book that have most affected my thinking, and where each one is showing up in the design of EngAGE Beverly.
Spirit-centered care, and the essence of a person
The central premise of The Elderwise Way is what the book calls spirit-centered care: the practice of engaging with the essence of a person, who they really are, regardless of capacity, cognition, or ability. Not a list of symptoms to manage. Not a diagnosis to accommodate. A person, whole, present, worth meeting.
This sounds simple. It is not. Most of the language we have inherited around dementia is loss-based. We talk about what someone used to be able to do, what they can't do anymore, the version of them we are grieving. The Elderwise approach asks a different question. Elderwise welcomes who is here, right now, in this room, with this heart, this history, this way of laughing, this way of being. The community shows up to meet people where they are and as who they are.
What stops me every time I think about this is the idea of mutual exchange. The book is clear that care is not something done to someone. It is something that happens between two people. Both parties bring something. Both parties are changed by it. Dignity is not a posture the caregiver assumes. It is the natural result of treating someone as a full human in the room with you, and being willing to receive what they offer back.
This reframes the language I use when I describe EngAGE Beverly. We are not a place that provides care. We are a place where care is exchanged. The members who gather with us are not recipients. They are contributors. Their presence shapes what the day becomes, and our team is being trained to notice and receive what each person brings.
The care that goes into preparing the space
One of the chapters I keep returning to describes the way Elderwise prepares for a day before anyone arrives. The centerpiece on the table is a small arrangement from nature, often something seasonal: a branch with new buds, a few stones, dried grasses. Each person has a placard with their name on it, set at their place. Each person has a mug that is theirs. The space is composed deliberately before the first knock at the door.
It would be easy to read this as a nice touch. A pleasant aesthetic. It is much more than that. What this preparation says, before anyone speaks a word, is: we were expecting you. Your seat was waiting. Your mug was set out. The arrangement at the center of the table was thought about. You are not arriving at a generic location. You are arriving at a place that has been made ready for you.
For someone living with memory changes, for whom the world can feel increasingly unfamiliar and unpredictable, this kind of preparation does real work. It signals belonging before cognition has to do any of the lifting. The body and the senses register it. The heart registers it. You belong here. We knew you were coming.
The centerpiece, the placards, the mugs: every one of these is a design decision we are making at EngAGE Beverly. Each member will have a mug that is theirs, kept on a shelf with their name. The dining table will have a seasonal natural arrangement, refreshed and noticed. Names will be at places. The first message a member receives, before any conversation begins, will be: a seat was held for you.
Slow time, and the space to be in the conversation
The book describes the Elderwise approach as taking place in a slow time zone. This is the part that, honestly, made me put it down and stare at the ceiling for a while. So much of how the world is structured for older adults with memory changes assumes that if a response is slow, the response is absent. We talk over. We finish sentences. We move on to the next prompt before the first one has been processed. We mean well. We are also, quietly, communicating: your participation is not worth waiting for.
Elderwise insists on the opposite. Conversations are allowed to breathe. A question is asked and then there is space for it to land, to be considered, to be answered. Members are given the time to articulate, to gather a thought, to find a word, to participate in something genuinely intellectual on terms that fit them. The result is not slower conversation. It is real conversation. The kind where a person is fully in it.
This is one of the most humanizing ideas I have encountered in any of my reading. The cognitive change is not the obstacle. The pace at which we expect a response is the obstacle. Slow the room down, and a person who had seemed to be receding comes more fully into view.
Our team will be trained on what I have started calling the pause practice. Ask a question. Wait. Continue waiting. Notice the impulse to fill the silence and let it pass. The pace of our home will be set not by what the staff can deliver, but by what each member needs in order to fully participate.
Belonging to something, with something to offer
One of the most quietly radical claims of The Elderwise Way is that the people gathering each day belong to a community in which their presence, their contributions, and their behavior matter to the others. This is not a metaphor. It is operational. The structure of the day, the way activities are designed, the way care partners hold the room: all of it is built to make this true.
When a member arrives, they are not entering a setting where they will be entertained or supervised. They are entering a community where their participation has weight. If they offer an observation, the group is shaped by it. If they share a memory, that memory becomes part of the room's collective knowledge of one another. If they show up tired or quiet, the group adjusts around them.
This is what I want for the people who gather at EngAGE Beverly. Not a place where they are cared for. A place where they belong, and where their belonging has consequence. Where their presence is not just tolerated or accommodated, but is part of what makes the day what it is.
The senses, woven into everything
The last thread I want to name, though it runs through every other thread in the book, is the deliberate weaving of the senses into the daily experience. Elderwise doesn't treat the senses as enrichment activities. The senses are the curriculum.
The smell of something simmering on the stove. The feel of wool, of dough, of a smooth river stone passed hand to hand. The sound of a familiar voice reading aloud, or of singing. The visual interest of a centerpiece that changed with the season. The taste of food that is real, prepared with care, served on dishes that feel like home.
For people living with memory changes, sensory experience is often the most direct route to feeling fully present. Words may slip. Names may go. The warmth of a mug in two hands, the smell of cinnamon, the brush of soft fabric: these things land. They register. They locate a person in their own life again, even if only for a moment.
Every gathering at EngAGE Beverly will have sensory anchors built in deliberately. Real food, prepared in our kitchen, with the smells reaching the gathering room. Natural materials in everyone's hands. Music that the members chose, not generic playlists. Texture, warmth, scent, and sound, treated not as background but as part of how each person comes home to themselves.
Why this matters for what we're building
EngAGE Beverly is being built as a small, home-based day community on Chicago's South Side, for older adults, with particular care for those experiencing early memory changes. Eight members maximum. A house, not a facility. An intergenerational partnership with The Castle Preschool. Days that are designed around relationship and belonging, not around throughput.
Reading The Elderwise Way did not change what EngAGE Beverly is. It clarified it. It gave language to instincts I had been carrying since we couldn't find a place that felt like home for Pops. It named practices I want to build into the daily rhythm of our community. And it gave me the comfort of knowing that what we are reaching for has been quietly modeled for nearly thirty years in Seattle, beginning in Sandy's own kitchen for twelve years and now spread across four Elderwise sites doing this same careful work.
After I finished the book, I reached out to Sandy. I wanted her to know what was being built in Beverly, and what her work had meant to me as I built it. What happened next is the part I still cannot quite believe. She invited me in. She has invited me to Seattle to see Elderwise for myself. She has offered to be a mentor of sorts, curious about what we are starting on the South Side, generous with what she has learned, and willing to help nurture this from afar. It is one thing to read a book by someone you admire. It is another to discover that the person behind that book is exactly as warm and present as the philosophy they wrote about. That, too, is the Elderwise Way.
If you have not read this book and you love someone living with dementia, or you work with people who are, I cannot recommend it more warmly. It is gentle. It is practical. It is suffused with the kind of attention that, the moment you encounter it, makes you realize how much of what we call care in this country is something else entirely.
We are building the place we wish had existed. The Elderwise Way, and the woman behind it, have given me one of the clearest pictures yet of what that place can be.
Julie Singler Founder & Executive Director, EngAGE Beverly
Sabersky, S., & Neuwald Falcon, R. (2020). The Elderwise Way: A Different Approach to Life with Dementia. BookBaby. Learn more about Elderwise at elderwise.org.
