One day when Valle Verde resident Marian Chuan went to visit a close friend at the Santa Barbara community’s Health Center, a woman in a wheelchair saw her and reached out her hand.
“I said, ‘What can I do for you?’” Chuan recalls. “She said, ‘I want a friend.’ That got me thinking that we needed more people to provide one-to-one friendship to long-term residents of the Health Center.”
Chuan, 82, had been a social worker and a professor at Boston University. Because she already volunteered every day at the Health Center, she knew the residents and the staff very well. She talked with her Valle Verde neighbors and recruited 20 volunteers.
When she invited author and ABHOW consultant David Troxel to address the group, he praised and endorsed their efforts. His Best Friends approach guides staff members at The Grove memory support program at Valle Verde and three other ABHOW communities.
Now, more than 40 Best Friends Volunteers regularly visit residents in the Valle Verde Health Center, going to lunch with them, taking a wheelchair walk outside, or just talking and sharing concerns.
“It’s not so much the activity, it’s how you do it,” says Chuan, one of six Santa Barbarans named Senior Citizen of the Year for 2009 by the Area Agency on Aging. “You have to take the time to sit down, to reach out. If you open your heart, you can reach them. It’s that person-to- person emotional connection that gives people a sense of peace.”
A resident she befriended told her recently, “Marian, when you are here, I feel safe. I feel good when you are around.”
