 Aloha, I am your host Winston Welch, and I am delighted that you are joining us again today for this special edition of Out and About, where every other week we explore a variety of topics, organizations, and events with the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are mine and mine alone and not connected with any organization. Joining me in the studio today, I am delighted to have Gary Powell, the Executive Director of the Caregiver Foundation. Welcome to the show, and thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. So we met at the Hawaii Disabilities Conference, was that where it was? And you had a wonderful display there, and I just assumed you were the national representative for this organization, and I pretty much found that this is a local organization. This is a local group. What is the Caregiver Foundation? The Caregiver Foundation is a not-for-profit based here in Hawaii that serves seniors and disabled adults. Literally every aspect of life you can imagine, from managing finances to coordinating care, any kind of care someone might need, right? Disability, care, you've got conservatorships, guardianships, trusteeships, all the way through death barrel and the state distribution, so part of the whole journey. And also, the emphasis on caregiver, so you also have a big role in supporting the folks that are giving care as well? Absolutely. Caregivers, all of us are caregivers in one way or another. Either we have been, we're going to be, we need the care, or someday somebody's going to be lining up for care right around us. So somewhere in our lives, caregiving will touch us. And tell us about the history of this organization. How did, how is it that you, that you founded the organization? I did. I've always seemed to be caring for someone. When I was 13, my grandfather had a series of strokes. And one of my jobs as the youngest grandchild was come home from school and take him down to the beach to walk in the sand to strengthen his legs. I had no idea it was caregiving. I was taking grandpa for a walk. I did that for several years until he passed away. And I was taking care of grandma. And then one thing led to another, and there was another person, and another person. Every job I've ever had had a caregiving component to it. So finally one night, my wife turns to me and she says, you know, you're in financial services, doesn't thrill you, but the only time you come home happy is when you've sort of undone somebody else's sale because it wasn't an appropriate product for the senior or that disabled person. But if you're not going to get paid anyway, let's just do what makes you happy. We started this foundation and 11 years now, I think it's the best job I could have ever had. That's really a wonderful, wonderful that you have a spouse that recognized that in you. I'm very lucky. Yeah. And supportive as well to say, let's do what you're really called to do, what you've been called to do and that you have a natural affinity for and a gift for helping people in these situations. And so it's only 11 years old that you've been doing it all your life. I've been doing it practically my whole life, but the organization, caregiver foundation is 11 years old. Okay. And so you have a way that it works is you have a fee for service model, is that right? Yes. And not for profits. We have a fee schedule because we're a self-sustaining organization. We don't depend on grants, although we would like them because it helps us expand and do other projects. But we know that when we make a promise to help someone, when they need the help, it becomes help that's needed more and more, not less and less. So if we, for instance, we're taking care of someone's finances, their caregiver had called us in, couldn't handle the money side of things, we start handling it. A few years down the road, we can't just suddenly say, well, we didn't get the grant this year, sorry, you've got to take care of it yourself. We created this self-sustaining model and it works very well, but we're able to grow slowly but continuous self-sustaining growth. And are these, is the way that you're funded by your clients or by the government or? By the clients or their families. Okay, so they might say, for example, give us a typical pace that might come across your desk. Recently, a caregiver, a long-distance caregiver, and don't let anybody tell you that 2,000 miles or more erases caregiving for your life, it's not so, but we've got a call from a son and a daughter on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, guess where Mom lives? Hawaii. Hawaii. They do not want to move. They don't have the ability to just give up their lives and come home. So they called and said, can we go see what's happening? We went, we talked with Mom. Mom needs a little bit of help. She certainly needs help with her finances because she's doing what so many older folks do. She's writing checks to these different charities and different magazine subscriptions and spending far more than she should. So we're able to take that burden from those kids, thousands of miles away, and become their hands while they can maintain that love relationship and not worry about the day to day. And so you might come in and say, you're going to pay the mortgage on time, make sure that all the bills for the insurance and the gas and the taxes, we just finished tax season. That's always a huge issue with people tax season. And then you provide a very transparent accounting to the families and to your clients as well, the end client. In that case, are you enlisting something like a senior attorney's for that and that sort of thing? Or how is that? We have a 15 member board and for a small organization like ours, that's a lot of people. They're all professional people, lawyers, attorneys, doctors, so that we have a built in filtering and oversight board watching everything that's going on. And when I need advice from somebody, all I have to do is pick up the phone, call a board member and I can get that advice quickly and effectively. Transparency is really, really important, especially because we deal with so many people with mental illnesses. And when age and mental illness combine, you have a real problem. So when you're working with families trying to provide care for that sort of individual, sometimes that individual perhaps shouldn't have that information, but their family certainly should have that information and be able to oversee what's going on. You're typically working with someone who maybe has a power of attorney or something along those lines? Yes. Sometimes we will actually take that position. We're called into a lot of cases by the Adult Protective Service. So there is nobody actively involved or if they're involved, they're involved in the wrong way. Yes. We will serve as guardian, conservator, trustee, durable power of attorney, health care power of attorney, those positions that sometimes families have conflict over. And by having a third neutral party involved, the caregiver can, as I said, go back to being a caring, loving family member and stop fighting about the money. And they might be fighting with their siblings about that or what's an appropriate level of care for mom or for our brother or whatever it is. And in that way, like you said, yes, they can just go back to being the son, being the daughter, being the friend, being the spouse, whatever it is. Because a lot of people, I mean, even if you have all these capabilities like your doctor's lawyers and, you know, specialists that you have on your board, even if you did have that ability, when you're adding this extra dimension of caregiving on that, where do you find that you deal with that incompetently? It's really hard. My own aunt is in a nursing facility and making that move brought up emotions in me just like it is in every other person that I work with. And when she went on hospice and I had to sign that document, it really bothered me to know that I was doing that for her, knowing that that could be the last time that I signed a document affecting her overall life. So just because you do this kind of work, you're not immune to the emotions, to the stress, to the anger, sorrow, all of the emotions that come. That's one of the reasons that we sponsor caregiver support groups. They're so important. A good doctor, if you're a caregiver, will prescribe that you go to a caregiver support group. That's a really good point. I don't think that most people think about having that being prescribed, but it's almost as important as prescribing time away and sitting under a tree. But in this case, with other folks who are going through the same thing and realizing there's no way you can know it all and just sharing with your peers. Just being able to express yourself openly, honestly, knowing that nobody is going to be looking at you like, oh, that sounds mean. Why are you talking like that? You can express your anger, your sorrow. It's so important, even though it's maybe just once a month or a couple of hours. The difference that makes in people's caregiving lives and overall life is just tremendous. This is such, and that's why when we met, I just thought, oh boy, this has to be a national thing. It's so critical out there that this is just a natural for that. And are there other things like this on the mainland? There are some organizations that do parts of what we do. I don't know of another organization that does the comprehensive nature of work that we'll undertake. What sort of organizations are you a member of in the mainland that would be connected with this work? We're members of the American Association of Daily Money Managers, the National Cardianship Association, National Association for Mental Illness. Gosh, there's a whole long list of different organizations that we belong to that we follow and coordinate with. One of the nice things we're able to do is to ask someone that needs help to give us their zip code. That's it. Just call up, give us your name, give us your zip code. Tell us what the situation is. We can usually find some organization near you, or at least a support group near you. Through our network and we will put you in touch with them. So you may get calls from folks that are watching this in Iowa and say, wow, we totally need that. And they can reach you via your website, which is www.thehecaregiverfoundation.org. Thecaregiverfoundation.org. Okay, and on there you have a wonderful website filled with many, many resources that are just super impressive. And obviously that you've had to build up over the years. Yes. Because you're asked the same questions again and again. Yes, and we try to collaborate. There are lots of links to other organizations and other publications that we feel can be of real help. We don't believe in rebuilding the wheel. If you have a good wheel, we're just going to make a little bridge over to it and suggest someone check out that information. If people wanted to, what would you say your client breakdown is as far as developmentally disabled adults versus, would it be seniors or those that are, how do you classify, how do you break down the clients that you serve? I would say that 75% of our clients are seniors. 25% would be either developmentally disabled adults, physically disabled adults or adults with a mental illness. So it might be that one of the parents, they have a child with Down syndrome, for example, and they're getting older and they are really concerned about what to deal with their child. Would that be a case? That's a very typical case. And it's such an important thing as parents who've been providing the protection, the love, everything for that person, that child with Down syndrome, that adult with Down syndrome. When the parents die, the need doesn't go away. But if the parents do not prepare and utilize something like a special needs trust or some legal structure to make sure that there is adequate resource to take care of that child, that person's going to have a really tough life. We do not have good overall social services to step in and take care of someone with special needs. Yeah, which is why your foundation is so important, the caregiver foundation. There's a plethora of resources on there. I want to talk later about how you fit all these pieces together, case management, and go over some specifics of what you deal with after a break that we have to take. But for those of you that are at home, we are talking with Gary Powell from the caregiver foundation. He's executive director. And you're based out of Wailua or? Wahiwa. Wahiwa. OK, up where there's a beautiful botanical garden, which incredibly I just went to for the first time this week. But highly recommended. I don't know if you've ever gone there. It's gorgeous. Gorgeous. So I am Winston Welch. We will be back in about a minute. This is out and about on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. During a break, what's the commercial ago to www.herigiverfoundation.org so you can join in discussion in a minute. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me, because security matters. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha. We're back. We're live. I'm Winston Welch. This is out and about on the Think Tech live streaming network series. And we are delighted to be talking with Gary Powell, executive director of the Caregiver Foundation today. Really important work that Gary and his team were able to do. Go to www.thecaregiverfoundation with the word the in front of it.org for information while we talk with Gary. So again, thank you for coming down here and sharing a bit about your foundation here. There's a ton of resources on your website. When someone comes to you, is it typically that person himself or herself, the senior, or is it a child or a concerned niece or be a neighbor? It's usually a concerned individual. Because dementia is such a problem in the aging community, rarely will you get somebody that actually needs help to recognize that they need that help. But usually someone else recognizing the need and coming to us and saying, what can you do? And is it a case where something maybe someone's become like a hoarder or they're not going to their medical appointments or they're writing checks, like you said, to everybody that sends them money in the mail. And you know it's like feeding birds once you give to one organization, they sell it. They sell your name. It's all of the above. Every detail amounts so much of it amounts to abuse. Mail abuse, getting these things in the mail that look like a paycheck. You get a credit card offer that says you have up to $5,000. A lot of times someone with dementia will look at that and say, well, I have $5,000. They don't read the fine print. How often do you get it in there where there's someone saying, I'm afraid that Mrs. Tanaka's being taking advantage of financially or maybe physically abused by her child or her nephew or something like that. At least 30% of the time. So it's quite high. It's very high. And in those cases, what would you do? Would you go out to the house and say, we're here with the caregiver foundation. Would you bring along caseworkers from Health and Human Services or the police? Or how does that work? It really depends. We will try and make an initial assessment ourselves. So if you were to come to me and say, my neighbor seems to be something's not right there, something's going on, we usually try and go just knock on the door and say, hi, I'm Gary with the caregiver foundation and do a visual assessment. If we think that the case looks very serious, then as an official mandated reporter, we'll contact the Adult Protective Service. They have their hands tied for most cases because there has to be actual visible abuse for them to be able to take action. Or have the individual say, yes, please come help me. So sometimes you have to work very hard to get other people involved. Sometimes it's a different family member that you can get involved. If the case looks like there is nobody helping and there is fraud going on, sometimes we can actually go to court and take guardianship or conservatorship. We'll explain to the court what's going on, let them do an investigation. And if they feel it's appropriate for us to serve in that legal capacity, we'll step in and do that. That then will give us the ability to help this person find a safe place to live. We'll be able to manage their assets so that they aren't being taken advantage of. Give them a quality of life that perhaps they're looking for but don't even understand how to find anymore. Do you go in after you've established that you're going to be in these folks' lives? Do you go in with the team then of people? Is it three or four people that are on the team? One is managing health care. One is managing finances. We usually coordinate that type of thing in. They're not necessarily working for us. But if we feel that there are caregivers that need to come in, we'll work with one of the agencies that we have a good history with and have a caregiver come in through that agency. We'll work with the financial services, that aspect we do in-house. That's a very critical area that has to be handled exactly right. But if the house needs repair or the yard needs cleaning or they need cooking or they need transportation to medical appointments, all of that we coordinate and make sure that it's happening. So kind of like the family that they should have, if they could have, we step in and be that. You're the one-stop shop then for people that can come through. Including but not limited to as well advanced care directives and medical directives and end of life wishes as well. So it might even be someone who comes to you and says, I don't have any close relatives or family members and I wanna know that I'm gonna be taken care of. So in that case, I can say, please, here's my situation. You step in and you assume that responsibility. We have a program, we call it, just call it standby assistance. We don't know what else to call it. But basically we get all kinds of legal paperwork and all the documents, birth certificates, everything we can think of that this person might need at some point in their aging life. We get all of that on file and then we check with them at least once a year. Are things going? Do they need any extra help? Anything going on? And they have a number they can call 24 hours a day if they needed help. But otherwise we stay out of their hair. So it's sort of a proactive service that's a standby, what do you call it, standby? We call it standby, just a standby service. So the day that person has a stroke, I'd forbid, but if they did, the hospital already knows that we're the advanced healthcare directive for that individual. Oh, that's a great piece of mind. They're not paying their bills. The phone company already has us on their account as an authorized person. They give us a call and say, what's going on? Now we know it's time to step in because they didn't know to tell us, the individual didn't tell us that they were having trouble with their financial bill paying or something like that. When people engage your services, how do they know what the fees will be in advance? Or is it something that they have to discuss every time? We have a published fee schedule that we have everybody go over. We go over it with them, we show them how other cases have developed. Cases very often in the early days cost much more than they do going on. It just takes a lot setting everything up. Because of the initial setup. But once it's going, then we're the coordinator. But we may bring in a caregiver to help you and that's charging their rate. We don't have a rate that we put on top of that. The only thing that would be paid for is the time we spent arranging it and overseeing it. So someone like the standby thing, it might be someone who's 60 years old and just says I want to get this taken care of just like you would with anything and say I want this in place so that when it happens at 60, 70, 80, 90, 120 or 130, my plan personally is 130 at least. 130, you got me beat by 10. You wanted to do 120. Yeah, I figure by the time that we need it, we're gonna be, you would take a pill and grow a new liver, kidney, heart. Maybe it'll put our brains back together and yeah, of all of that. But I have great faith in medical science. But regardless of that, all of us have a number written in the sky as to when that's going to come. So this is really comforting to me to see that we have this, Hawaii has so many amazing things out there that the other states and cities don't have. We're far advanced in so many ways here. Sometimes we're not as advanced but in many ways I think we are really advanced and this is one of them. You have plans to roll this out nationally. Is this something that you're looking at? We would like to. We've been approached by several states who start chapters there. But I need to find the right people. We want it done exactly the same way. Don't want it changed up to become some business, something out in another state where you have to have a million dollars before we can do business with you or your net worth has to be. A lot of our clients run out of money. How does that work then? We have what we call our Pulama Aloha Fund and that's where we raise funds. That's where grants and donations and requests some people leave us a house or things they don't have somebody else to leave it to. They put it in that Pulama Aloha Fund and we use those funds to underwrite people who run out of their own funds. You're 501c3 then. Yes, absolutely. So if I want to donate to you it is tax deductible to the Pulama State of the Law and talk to your accountant about that wonderful, obviously, charity to leave assets to and I think especially if you've been taking care of people in this capacity then they think this is a wonderful organization that's supported me that I would like to support after I'm no longer here. And I imagine happens fairly frequently. It does, we don't go out there and ask for it a lot. Just because we have trouble going out and asking. And I could see that some people would want to make sure that this is the wish of the person. So you can have some, you want to make sure that that's exactly buttoned down but I can see where this would be exactly something where people. One of the things that we do is work closely with the individuals existing or previous advisors. So if you'd had an attorney that you worked with for 40 years and suddenly you're not because your memory's gone or a CPA that you used to have do all your taxes we'll try to go back to that person and have them pick it back up. I already know the history. They can gain confidence in what we're doing and then just we become you in that respect. You're not looking to go on and changing someone's will if they want to leave it all the goodwill or salvation army. You're leaving it as that. Absolutely. You're just helping with the execution of that. Although some people who have their right minds may decide that this is they might and there's and that's fine. And I'm sure you have you're right in this thick of things with different family members and probably some family members think oh mom doesn't need that. She's fine with me doing it or or sometimes we're working with the caregivers, the caregiving family and helping them figure out how best to structure an inheritance. Inheritance. I mean, you've got the whole thing on here. I just want to quickly read off these different categories that you cover aging Alzheimer's disease and dementia, alcohol and drug abuse and misuse, which is seniors are a big category that assistive technologies like reading devices, caregiving, disabilities, driver safety for seniors, elder abuse, end of life care, family caregiving, financial matters, brief support. Health issues, housing and continents, legal matters, long term care, meal services, mental health care, recreation, spiritual spirituality, wheelchairs and other things that are not here. Like, like you said, your standby program. This is a incredible program that you have here, Gary, that is really blessed to have you as a executive director and founder. You're obviously a kind, gentle, spirited person that's perfectly suited for this. I really appreciate being here. Well, I appreciate you coming down and if people want to know more information, they can go to your website, which is thehergiverfoundation.org. Exactly. And will you come back again so we can explore some of these other issues in more depth because obviously we've just been able to talk about the very top of them, but it's a very critical and important work that you do. And it really requires a lot of aloha. Obviously having abundance, I'm sure that your staff does as well, just if they're part of this. We've got a fabulous staff. And a shout out to every one of them because I know this is a job where you've got to live aloha and live with a lot of love for your clients. So I'm sad to say we are out of time today, so we're gonna have to wrap it up here. I look forward to you coming back after your vacation sometime. Just let me know, I'll be glad to. And work, yes. So anyway, I am Winston Welch. This has been a very special edition of Out and About on Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with Gary Powell, executive director of the Caregiver Foundation. Very special organization that's doing a lot of good in our community. If it's not in your home state or city, maybe you can talk to Gary about founding something there, but that's probably its own can of worms, but we'll explore that next time when we have Gary on here. Thanks for tuning in. We welcome your feedback. Thanks for our broadcast engineer, Ian Davidson. Actually, no, it's Robert McLean today, our floor manager, Eric Hollander, and to J-Fi Del, our executive producer who puts it all together. We are carrying out our campaign, so if you love the show, give some money to Think Tech Hawaii and say Winston sent you. I'll see you every other Monday here at 3 p.m. Thanks everybody and aloha.