Life Center Update March 2021

Fund Raising and Grant writing for the Life Center is kicking off again. Due to unforeseen circumstances (COVID 19 Pandemic) we have taken a year off from progressing the LIFE project forward, but we are back and excited to move the project forward once again!

The past year has been a challenging year in more ways than one.

 The nursing home has worked through a pandemic and has suffered great loss and challenges. Rules and regulations continued to change and alter. All the staff did their very best to continue to offer care to residents. The Logan Manor is not a facility that is built to withstand a pandemic. The shared rooms and limited space created a huge challenge when it came to isolating residents who were positive. All spaces were utilized the best that it could be to ensure that we could create the best possible isolation areas within the facility. In the new facility the residents would all be in their own rooms so there wouldn’t be as much of a possibility of spreading infections from resident to resident. In the case of an outbreak there would also be the ability to make one of the greenhouses an isolation area where you could house all the residents who had the infection to keep others more protected. Since our staff would be assigned to one greenhouse at a time it would also keep the staff from working with both positive and negative residents. The new building would not have solved all the problems, but it would have given us a better setup to fight the outbreak.

The school also faced many challenges. They have worked hard to keep up to date with changing systems as well. They have adapted to distance learning and to going to school in person through an ongoing pandemic while ensuring social distancing and keeping all the kids and employees safe.

Through the pandemic both the nursing home and the school have noticed one thing; we all miss seeing each other and visiting. The pandemic created a lock down that couldn’t fully stop visiting from occurring but restricted the visits to zoom meetings and window visits. During the visits the daycare and school kids ask why they are not able to come into the nursing home and the residents want to know how long until they are able to come back in. The bonds that have been formed between the two groups are heartwarming. It’s fun to get to see them interact with each other in new and creative ways.

Some people have asked about the nursing home and school kids infecting each other. We believe that the proximity would not have created problems but instead could have helped to keep spirits up. Though the nursing home had to be locked down and visitors are still not allowed inside there would have been many more opportunities to interact with each other through windows on a frequent basis. The residents love seeing the kids through the windows and through zoom and it would be much easier to do that frequently with the closeness of the facilities.

Fundraising has been going great so far, as of March 2021 we have 443,000 donated or pledged locally. Our fundraising goal is to raise 1.2 million dollars locally so we are well on the way.

We are also working with foundations to get some of the remaining money needed as well. Hopefully we will have news to share soon!