Neighbors Helping Neighbors providing care to Tempe seniors

Tempe Community Action Agency is helping older adults “age in place” through its program called Neighbors Helping Neighbors. This community health worker-operated program by Tempe Community Action Agency (TCAA) assists Tempe seniors in remaining at home for as a long as possible as they age.

Through Neighbors Helping Neighbors, health workers provide monthly home visits to clients to address different social determinants of health such as access to food, social isolation and safety.

The program assists just under 100 seniors a year through home visits and even more through community education classes, including the use of a prop called the Claris communication tablet. Carrie Aranda, Director of Mission Advancement at TCAA, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors was originally based on helping connect seniors to the community of Tempe, then later on TCAA adopted the organization as one of their programs.

“Neighbors Helping Neighbors is staffed with community health workers, so they’re people from the community who know the community, who are trusted by the community, that can connect folks to those kind of complex systems of benefits and health care,” Aranda said.

The program assists seniors in understanding the access they have to their benefits and what their prescriptions are for, making it possible “for that bridge between a community member and the health care system to exist,” Aranda said. The seniors in Neighbors Helping Neighbors are matched with volunteers based on their needs.

Aranda said TCAA is seeing an older demographic in shelters and “as the population grows older and fixed incomes become less compared to inflation and higher rent prices,” they are noticing more seniors in critical need.

The goal of Neighbors Helping Neighbors is to provide tools for seniors to age safely in their homes and one of their tools is the Claris tablet.

“They are very simple; they’re set up with big buttons on the screen, we teach them how to use it, they come with their own internet so that they are not dependent on somebody having internet in their home. And it’s a way for them to communicate with our staff. It’s a way they can communicate with family and friends,” Aranda said.

That is one way they are keeping seniors in the community safe. The program wants to watch out for seniors in order to guide them toward independence in their own life.