 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And my guest today is Ruby Baker, who is the Executive Director of Cove, the community of Vermont elders. And that organization has some very interesting and exciting programs that she is gonna tell us about and how you and your associates can get involved in some of these vital projects that are going on right now in Vermont during this pandemic time. And first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself, Ruby. Well, thank you so much for having me here, Dennis. I'm Ruby Baker. I've born and raised here in Vermont on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, where I still live with my family. And I've been the Executive Director at Community of Vermont Elders for three years as of today. In fact, today is my anniversary. So thank you, thank you. It's been a really exciting and interesting three years, just working and getting to know about everything that's going on at Cove and all across the state to help older adults age comfortably and with intention and decision. So I've loved, maybe not every minute, but most of the minutes of my three years here. That's great. It's been a very exciting time and we'll get into some of those aspects. But also tell us about Cove. What is it, how it got started? Give us a little bit of the history. Yeah, so Cove has been around since the early 80s. We are a nonprofit organization that was initially started to fill a gap that was identified here in Vermont, really related to the need for grassroots advocacy that represented older people. There's a lot of advocacy in our world still today that represents businesses that serve people, service industries that serve people. And it's much harder to find organizations and entities that represent the people themselves. And so that was really initially the mindset behind Cove and where we started from. So then fast forward 20, 30 years, here we are now, we still are doing that grassroots advocacy. We work with all our partners, both older adults themselves and service providers to make sure that we're striking a good balance there. We've added in that time to what we offer, recognizing that a natural outgrowth of advocacy and policy work is education, understanding what's available to you and how to be involved, understanding how to protect yourself because government and businesses and service providers can't do it all for you. And really wrapping our heads around the concept that aging is something that's happening to all of us, right? We're all growing older. And if we're lucky, we will all become old. So how do you approach that with intention? How do you grow old on purpose? And that's sort of my war cry is, yes, we're going to do it. So let's do it on purpose. Let's grow old on purpose. Let's make those decisions now that give us the best chance we can have of being the older adult we want to be, whatever that is. Well, in terms of demographics, doesn't Vermont have a rapidly growing aging population or a population of aged people compared to the rest of the region? I may have imagined that, but I recall hearing some stories about that. You're not imagining it. Vermont is, I believe at this point, we are sort of in a bed heat with New Hampshire and Maine to see who will be the oldest state in any given week. Vermont is, I think, the second oldest state right now and the most rapidly aging state, all of New England actually is on the older side as compared to some of the other parts of the country. But Vermont is certainly much older. And of course, our more rural communities tend to be the older communities as opposed to, I call it the banana belt over there in Burlington where it's nice and warm for you guys today, I bet. It is. Yeah, so, you know, when you look at the oldest counties in the state, the oldest county in Vermont, I believe is Essex County and the Northeast Kingdom more generally is the oldest region of the state, but the state itself has a rapidly aging demographic. Which is great. What particular problems does that present? The rapidly growing and the volume of aging population, what particular problems does that present right now? Well, I try to wrap my head around that question and redirect it a little bit because I don't like to think about the aging demographic as a problem. It's not something we need to fix. It's just something that's true. And so I guess I wouldn't phrase it as we've got a problem and we need to fix it, but I will say that there are certainly different types of challenges at all different age levels, right? Young children, some of the challenges we're facing are nutrition and access to childcare. As we get older, we're facing issues in workforce, workforce development, educational opportunities. So for the older population, a lot of the challenges are centered around housing, technology access, stability and income, safety. And it's funny. I say safety and a lot of people chuckle because Vermont's not generally compared to the rest of the world. It's not dangerous to live here or we don't think of it. But there are a lot of pieces of safety that go unnoticed and it can be anything from having appropriate modifications to your home to keep you physically safe from falling. It can be mental health. It can be, and it can be the things that we more commonly associate with safety like abuse and fraud and scam and exploitation. So really those are the big issues. And I think it all ties back to this commitment that Vermont has made to aging in place or aging in the community and how do we create communities that are well designed to give access to older adults to affordable housing, to financial stability, to medical care, mental health care. So I guess that sort of answers your question. Well, I like the way you phrased it positively, not that it's a problem, it's an opportunity to get people in touch with services. So that's really a very positive spin or a positive aspect of your organization. And that's what we like to emphasize positive, positively Vermont. And in line with that, I've gone through your website. It's a very good website. And we're gonna put that on the screen here to let people know how they can get in touch with you and a number of projects I see are involved. But let's talk about this aging in Vermont resource guide. First of all, tell us about that. So aging in Vermont is, I would say, it is my favorite thing that I have done in the last year. When the pandemic hit, we realized that we needed to pivot. A lot of the work that we had been doing up until that point was going into communities and offering presentations, offering one-on-one support in person with people. And that's part of what has made COVID so effective over the years. And that was taken away, we couldn't do that. So then we decided, we realized that we needed to shift how we are thinking about the education and access piece of what we do. And this idea had sort of been on the back burner for a while is, man, wouldn't it be great to have a resource guide that really was comprehensive, that was updated regularly so it didn't get out of date. That didn't, it wasn't just a phone book, right? I don't wanna give everyone a phone book. We've got the internet, you can search something. Everyone's got a phone book in there. But I wanted to provide information about how to handle, information about what services are out there and what they do and why they're important. And so we pulled together an incredible team of volunteers and staff members to design and publish in nine weeks, if you can believe it. We designed and published an 84-page resource guide and directory. The directory, these of course captures most of the biggest services, the statewide services, the biggest service providers in the regions. And then the other 60 pages is really, how to keep yourself safe? How to, what are the components of an estate plan? How do you advocate if you're interested in taking an advocacy role in something? So really just the information that we think adults need to be able to access as we grow older to live our best lives in our communities. And I would say that we tried very hard to make sure that that information was specific to Vermont. Because Vermont's special, we're unique, we have great programs and we want people to know what they are. Let me ask you this, is that, I know it's available online. I saw it on the website today and I suppose you can also take that and Xerox it. Are there any physical copies of this that you have? How else about that? If I rotated my computer, you would see that I've got about a thousand copies sitting here in my office. Anybody who would like a physical copy can either email me or if there's a form on our website that you could fill out and we'll send you one in the mail. The online version is you can certainly download it and print it, but we've already paid for the printing. So just let us send you one. And then of course you can just view it online as well and it's a fully navigable. What about like senior centers? There's one right across the street for me and for community groups like neighborhood preservation organizations, can they get it in bulk? Absolutely, we've been delivering them all over the state for the last six months or nine months I guess at this point and we're still dropping off deliveries. I think we brought 200 up to Agewell last week. We've got some more up to Cider. So certainly anybody who's interested in having multiple copies should certainly contact us. We sent a copy out to every library in the state so that they could have one. But yeah, certainly just get in contact with us and we will happily provide you with as many copies as you want. We want this out there in the world. Excellent and let's have, I know we're gonna put it on the video but tell us your address in case people are just listening. Yeah, absolutely. My email address is rubyruvyb as in Baker at vermontelders.org or you could email cove at vermontelders.org, COV. What about the mailing address in Montpelier? Our physical mailing address. Or our mailing address is P.O.Box1276 Montpelier, Vermont, 05602. Excellent. Now that we got all that out of the way, I wanna go into some of your specific projects that are going on right now. Let's talk about hearing aids. Tell us about that project. Yeah. I didn't know much about hearing aids when I first started that cove. And since I've been here, my father has gotten hearing aids and I've been learning more and more about just how challenging that the experience of hearing loss can be for an individual. And then in the course of our advocacy work, I discovered that there was a group that had been working to make sure that hearing aids were included in insurance. But they've been working on that for, I think 20 years at this point. It's been a long, long fall. And so we decided we needed to be involved in this. As you might imagine, the rates of hearing loss increased dramatically with age. Certainly there are many, many young people who have hearing loss in Vermont. In fact, there are over 70,000 Vermonters with hearing loss of all people. But those rates do increase as you get older and there is no insurance covered for hearing aids. And the piece that really burned me up when I discovered it is that Vermont is the only state in New England that does not have an insurance mandate. And that was the moment where I said, that's wrong. This is wrong. We knew it was wrong already. And we're behind everybody else. We think we are progressive, but we're behind us. And we need to catch up and we need to make sure that those 70,000 could be even as many as 120,000 Vermonters have access to the hearing aids that they need to live a high quality life. So we've been working together with this coalition which is called Here Here Vermont. And we have a petition out there if people are interested in signing it. It's on our Facebook page. It's on our website. It's been circulating the state. We have over 1200 signatures on this petition so far. People sharing their personal stories and experiences and really recognizing how vital this is. So I would encourage you to sign the petition asking that this be taken up. And then I would also say that right now there's a bill. We have a bill, age 266. Yes, age 266 mandates hearing aid coverage through as many avenues as it is possible for Vermont to mandate insurance coverage. So of course, well, maybe people don't know but Vermont doesn't have the authority to mandate certain categories of insurance coverage. But for the ones that we do, they're included in this bill. And the bill would set us on a path to have coverage for as many Vermonters as possible within the next several years. So it's really exciting. And the bill right now, we're just waiting for a hearing. So if you believe in this, if our viewers believe in this please call your legislators. If we get a hearing this year, that makes everything move a little bit faster. And this is really what we're pushing for right now. Start the conversation. Excellent. Who's sponsoring that, that bill age 266? Representative Wood is the lead sponsor on the bill and currently the bill is waiting for its hearing in House Health Care Committee with Representative Flippert. Okay, excellent. Now tell us a little bit about your work on email scams and other kinds of things that are plaguing not only senior citizens, but pretty much everybody. Tell us about your work on that here. Yeah, so a huge body of our work and most of our staff time is dedicated really towards this idea around safety and specifically we do a lot of work on scam and fraud prevention. We have a program called the Senior Medicare Patrol that is specifically dedicated to identifying and preventing and responding to instances of Medicare fraud, error and abuse. And I guess the piece that always just blows my mind when I think about Medicare fraud is that the latest, the most recent statistic I heard is that over $120 billion every year is lost to Medicare fraud. And while this isn't a direct cost to a Medicare beneficiary, our tax dollars pay for that. And so this is a cost to all Americans is that $120 billion in fraud. We also expand beyond Medicare fraud and do a lot of work around more general scam fraud and exploitation, looking at things like dating fraud and identity theft and other types of insurance scams. We work on really educating older adults to help identify. We have a wonderful team, a theater troupe based out of Berwick Theater in Burlington. And they are all older adults themselves and they write skits based on their own personal experiences with scam and fraud and pizzas that they've learned. And they really use humor and honesty to help people wrap their heads around what could happen and help them see how sneaky these scammers are. They're professionals, they're professional scam artists and they're going to do their best to steal from you. So we do a lot of education around that. Our savvy seniors are incredible and they've managed to bring everything online. We had a wonderful presentation by them a couple of weeks ago in UT, they're skits and videos on our website and on our YouTube channel as well. It's great. Let me ask you about this. I have to put my phone off the hook when I do this because normally it's ringing with the scam calls and the spam calls and all that despite numerous complaints of the Federal Trade Commission and various letters to officials. These things are coming in rampant. They're with the caller ID fraud, the spoofing where it looks like it's a neighbor calling are you involved in that activity? Preventive activity, tell us about it. Yeah, we partner with the Attorney General's office on a lot of network because really they have the authority statewide to work on that. But I will say that again and again, we run into this issue and a lot of these calls originate outside of the United States or outside of the jurisdiction of our Attorney General. And so we don't have the ability to stop them. In many cases, by attempting to steal from people they're already breaking the law. So we don't have much ability to stop them. And what we tell people is to hang up. Don't talk to them. Don't engage in that conversation. Every time you talk to somebody who is a potential scammer, they are gathering information about you. They may hear your dog barking background and next time they call with a pet based scam. They may hear a name spoken in the background while you're talking to them. And then they know that they can call using that name or trying to connect with that person. So don't talk to them. Just hang up the phone. They are professionals and they're gathering every piece of information they can about you to customize their approach. And so that that's the advice we give to people. Great. Well, there's another thing that's going on apparently and it's very timely right now. And your organization is working to prevent it. The vaccine situation. Tell us about that. Other than some of the vaccine scams going on and that kind of thing. Yes. There have been vaccine scams happening across the country and some of them are related to like the Ventbright and other ticket sales sites that claim that the site grant brings, but someone is using the site to claim that they can sell you a ticket for a vaccine. You do not have to pay for a vaccine in Vermont. And if you have questions all of the Vermont Department of Health do not pay for a vaccine. Do not pay to jump ahead in line. That's not real. And all older Vermonters. In fact, everyone over the age of 40 is eligible for a vaccine as of today. So, if you are interested in getting a vaccine call the Vermont Department of Health website. I mean, call their phone line or get on the website or connect with your local pharmacies and go through those proper channels. If someone contacts you and says that they have a way to jump the line or that's not real. Well, another thing maybe you could help us with now is this is a boom in it. And that is remote learning and support remote learning. In fact, many organizations now are running meetings exclusively on Zoom. And I'm sure that everybody including senior citizens needs help with that. Tell us what you're doing in that area. Oh, so many things, Dennis. We've been doing so many things around technology access and adapting to this new world of remote interaction. I would say that the first thing that we recognize that we needed to do is we needed to help older adults who had never used Zoom or Webex or Google Meet or any of the other platforms needed to help them figure out how to do that. And so early early on, I think in April or May of last year one of our staff members, a couple of our staff members started being available to do one-on-one coaching. Everything from I will sit on the phone with you and I will help you move your mouse to the right place. We can do screen share and we've even had some circumstances where two people get together in the same room, fully mask and work through how to use your device whether it be a tablet or a computer or a smartphone so that you can access. And another piece that was really nerve-wracking for a lot of people, maybe it wasn't downloading the software or logging in, but just feeling unsure of the... Oh, what's the word I'm looking for? The sort of the protocol, right? How do you, what are the behavioral... The rules, yeah. Yeah, what are the rules of this new remote society? So we put together some videos and trainings and to help people understand how to mute, how do you have to show your video? How do you, what are the rules of engagement here that we're starting to identify and understand? So we've done a lot of that one-on-one work. We also moved our educational presentations online. So every two weeks we have a Zoom call and then it's put up on our YouTube channel and we cover everything from presentations from the Posing Control Center and the Federal Trade Commission, all the way to, we've had theatrical performances and readings. Last week we had an Army Chair Height with a retired... She used to work as a perk ranger in a national park. So we've had a wide range of different types of presentations that range from the fun and silly all the way to the very serious and sometimes scary topics that we need to be thinking about and addressing. So those happen every other week and you can find them on our Facebook, you can join our mailing list and you'll have an update about them every week, every other week. And then I guess the last piece that was a smaller piece but still just very exciting to start thinking about these types of opportunities. We were talking with someone who had a young son in high school who was feeling very isolated. And we said, you know, gosh, wouldn't it be great if we could connect these isolated young high school students with isolated older adults and they could share thoughts and experiences and feelings. And it's not one person doing the other a favor, it's just mutual connection. So we set up a pilot program called Connecting over the summer where we went through a training and a pairing process and we paired people who then had a weekly call one hour every week where they just talked about things. We had a group that was, we had a pair that was really interested in Eastern European dance. We had a pair that is really interested in climate change and they connected with each other. And I think all of our pairs at this point have remained in contact with each other throughout the year even after our pilot program ended. So we're doing that again in the summer to bring older adults and younger adults together to think about and to bridge generations. We're all humans and we all have similar experiences that we wanna share and talk about and think about. So I'm really excited about it. I think it's so cool that someone who grew up with her grandmother in town and really had the opportunity to hear those stories and understand some of the history behind them. It was incredible. That's amazing. Your organization really seems to be getting ahead of a lot of things. That idea of isolation caused by the pandemic. I've seen stuff, I followed this very closely particularly with studies that are going on now in Britain which had up before us there are massive studies coming out of the UK and also coming out of Canada about the impacts on everyone particularly senior citizens and other communities about the isolation caused by this. And of course the studies are there. They're very frightening in a way. They're medically based and psychologically based but the need is doing something about it. And you seem to be addressing that. Well, I would say Dennis that while we're we've all had a taste of isolation in the past year but this was an issue long before the pandemic for older adults. And we've known for a long time that this is a problem that this is something that we need to be addressing as a society. I think the Gates Foundation came out with a study almost 10 years ago at this point that again medically based that was able to prove that isolation is worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and kills more people than diabetes. It is so damaging to our well being and it's such a complicated issue that as a society across the country and here in Vermont we're not entirely sure how to deal with it but I think everyone having had the chance to feel isolation in the last year helps. That's amazing how you're on top of everything and it must be really challenging which leads me to one of the most important questions we always ask guests on positive leave Vermont. What do you need? What do you need from the general public, the legislature, anyone viewing us or community organizations? How can people help you help them? I need so many things. I can't even begin to list them all that is what I need most and it's not me that needs it. What we all need most is to acknowledge that we're aging and to think about it and to accept it and to age on purpose. We all need to do that. We need to plan for our own older lives but in terms of Cove, in terms of our specific work that we need help with, I would say that there are several ways that people can help. Being informed is a huge part of it. Again, we're an advocacy and education organization so sign up for our mailing list to become a member of Cove and we will help keep you informed so that you know what's going on and where the pressure points are that you can become involved. How to volunteer with us? How to share information and engage in our programming? So I would encourage anyone who is interested to go to our website and sign up to be a member, sign up for our mailing list, get a copy of our resource guide. All of those pieces are really important and then more specifically for people who are interested in advocacy piece and that grassroots movement to support older adults across the state for a couple of ways to be involved. If you're specifically inspired by the hearing aid coverage, which I am and I can talk for the entire time about just this piece, contact your legislators and let them know that we need the hearing now. We need to be able to tell them our story this year, not session, not five years from now. We need to pass this bill and if not now when. So contact your legislators, sign the petition, tell us your story, write letters to the editor, be involved and more broadly if you're interested in engaging in policy, we have a small group that meets every week called Global and we are, we co-supports this small group of advocates to be engaged in the issues they care about. A lot of people say, oh, older adults are only advocating for nursing homes and healthcare. Well, older adults are also human beings who have personal interests and things that you care about. So we have someone in our team who cares a lot about climate change and advocates on issues of climate change and we help him find the right people to access, we help him follow bills and provide the scheduling and then we talk through issues and how to be engaged in them. And there are many, many issues like that that go far beyond someone might pigeonhole as an older adult issue. And so we care a lot about human beings as their whole selves. That's great. That's wonderful. And of course there are ways that foundations various other people can contribute financially or they're open to that. And... Oh yes, yes. If you wanna give us money, please give us money. But there are so many ways to be involved in this. I always liked to bring that up at some point. That always means we're getting near the end. And this really has been a very interesting conversation and certainly to be followed up, I urge people to take a look at the website and I'm sure Ruby's available to be contacted if you or your organization want more information or to volunteer and assist in any way. So thank you very much Ruby. Thank you very much Ruby. And my guest today has been Ruby Baker, the executive director of COVE, community of Vermont elders. And thank you so much for having me Dennis. Thank you. You've been really, really a great, bring us up to date on so many issues. So thank you all. And thank you for watching Positively Vermont. This is Dennis McMahon.