ROSH HASHANAH EDITION 5782 L’CHAIM® MAGAZINE
The precise date of birth for the institution now known as Kavod Senior Life appears to have been lost in the mists of time.
Michael Klein, current president-CEO of the Denver Jewish community’s flagship senior residential community, smiles when he’s asked the question.
“No one really knows that,” he said in a recent interview with the Intermountain Jewish News. “There were a lot of moving pieces that were going on, but we know that it was 1971. We know it was 50 years ago, but when did the committee start doing things, when was the structure started and finished, when did the first person move in?
“It’s a mystery.”
Regardless, Kavod is in the midst of celebrating its 50th anniversary during 2021 with a series of events and celebrations, headlined by the virtual fundraising event on Aug. 26, which featured the comedic duo the Sklar Brothers.
“Why did we pick this date?” Klein says. “It was a good time to do it. We decided that we’d celebrate the entire year — to make it a year of celebration.”
The Past — ‘Allied Jewish Housing’
Mysteries aside, a few hard facts are known about the genesis of the Allied Jewish Apartments, the original name before Kavod — the Hebrew word for “honor” — was adopted in 2014.
Responding to the growing need to provide housing for Jewish elders “in an environment that celebrated their Jewish heritage and commonality,” meetings between the Allied Jewish Community Council (now JEWISHcolorado) and Allied Housing Inc. began in 1966.
“Again, we’re kind of getting into the area of legend and story and myth,” Klein says, “but the story was that Elaine Wolf, who has been a very major contributor to Kavod, was at that point looking at for a place for her mom, and there really was nothing that existed. She wanted a Jewish setting for her mother . . . and she was the one who really pushed the federation at the time to get something going.”
Steven Summer, Kavod’s board chairman, puts the origins of Kavod into historical context, explaining how a new, government-supported approach to senior housing was just getting started in the late 1960s.
“The late Sixties were when Medicare and Medicaid were passed by Congress,” Summer says. “Everybody was beginning to think about what we need to do for our seniors as they began aging.”
That national impetus, strengthened by determined local Jewish community support, resulted in relatively quick progress. In 1968, with the help of a loan from the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, a parcel of land in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood was purchased.
Longtime executive vice president of the Allied Jewish Council, Nat Rosenberg, was instrumental in securing the HUD loan and the founding of Allied Jewish Apartments.
Sometime during 1971, the Allied Jewish Apartment’s first building, with 142 apartments, was completed and opened for residency.
It didn’t take long for the Jewish community to realize that the demand for senior housing was considerably larger than originally anticipated. The apartments opened its second building (the East Building, with 159 apartments) in 1979 and its third (the South Building, with 96 apartments) in 1983.
The timing of the expansions turned out to be fortuitous for, in the mid-1980s, significant immigration of former Soviet Jews to Denver began in earnest. Many of these immigrants were elderly and had modest incomes, precisely the community the Allied Jewish Apartments were designed to serve.
But not exclusively, Klein clarifies.
“It was created to serve the Jewish population,” he says of the Allied Jewish Apartments, “but even from the beginning it was never going to be exclusively for the Jewish population.”
In fact, Klein adds, 50 years after its founding, Kavod’s residents are now at a 65% non-Jewish to 35% Jewish ratio, reflecting both changing trends in senior residential housing patterns and expanded Jewish community resources for its senior population.
Regardless of the changes, the founders of the original Kavod had the right idea and took decisive action to act upon it.
“The Jewish leaders came together,” Klein says. “They identified a need and they set about to create a way to meet it.”
The Present — ‘Kavod Senior Life’
Kavod Senior Life today has 397 apartments in all, and averages about 400 residents at any given time.
“Most of that is independent living, but we do have about 30 assisted living apartments,” Klein says. “Again, I think the Jewish community saw the need that when people came in and were independent, at some point they would need additional care, and so we built our assisted living program to let people age in our community.”
Beyond the point where residents are able to handle assisted living, they usually move to Shalom Park or another nursing facility, Klein says.
(Despite the fact that “nursing home” is a term used loosely for many kinds of senior communities, it actually has a precise and officially sanctioned definition, which is more intensive than the options offered at Kavod. People with severe memory loss, for example, or who are approaching their end of life, are more likely to reside in an actual nursing home.)
The Kavod community of 2021 is significantly different from the Allied Apartments of 1971, Klein observes.
“When we started, it was more designed to be an apartment building with some additional services, not a lot, but some. We always had a meal program . . . but it was really viewed more as an apartment building.
“Over the past 10 or 15 years, we’ve looked at making more all-inclusive and comprehensive type of services available. So if you go to Kavod today, we have a whole floor that’s dedicated to health and wellness. In partnership with another company, we have occupational physical therapists there five days a week.”
Kavod also now has the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Health and Wellness Center, funded by the foundation of the same name, which opened in 2020, “so now we have physicians in the building two-and-a-half days a week — geriatricians, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, dental services,” Klein says.
Those services were augmented, also last year, when CU Medicine established an onsite geriatric clinic to provide needed medical services for residents.
Partnerships with mental health therapists and social workers allow residents access to those areas of expertise as well.
For Jewish spiritual needs specifically, Kavod recently appointed a rabbi on its staff. The presence of its current chaplain, Rabbi Stephen Booth-Nadav, Klein says, has been invaluable during the past pandemic year with its challenges of anxiety and need for isolation.
In addition to such medical and religious amenities, the Kavod of today has a hairdresser on site and two vehicles to take residents on trips to shop or attend cultural events. Trips to such locations as Glenwood Springs and the Grand Canyon — and even connections to cruises to Alaska and the Bahamas — are regularly scheduled.
The whole idea, Klein says, is to provide easy access, usually within the Kavod facility itself, to just about everything residents may need or want.
“Our goal is to let people age in place, surround them with services that they need and make life comfortable for them,” he says. “It really is holistic.”
Summer makes the point that Kavod seeks to be much more than a place of residence for those who live there.
“It’s not just, here’s a place, we’ve now put a roof over your head and will provide meals for you, but how do we make sure that experience makes them feel like they’re part of a bigger family, that they’re truly in a home? In the old days, if you will, it was just a roof over your head, but now we make sure that that experience is responsive to both your physical and mental health needs.
“We want the experience of being there to be one that you feel good about and your family feels good about as well.”
Perhaps the biggest change to evolve over the past half century, Klein and Summer agree, is how Kavod has integrated itself into the larger Jewish — and even the general — community.
“We started working closely with Shalom Park, with the Jewish Community Center, with Jewish Family Service,” Klein says, “really making connections with those agencies, actually doing things with them.”
This approach expanded considerably with its Kavod on the Road program, which has formed partnerships with some 20 Jewish and non-Jewish agencies — from a host of Denver area synagogues to the Denver Public Library and Alzheimer’s Assn. — to provide enhanced programming, not only for Kavod residents but other seniors in the community.
“If I look back on anything that we’ve done,” Klein says, “I’d say that was the major accomplishment.”
The Pandemic
In all likelihood, the greatest challenge Kavod has ever faced has taken place over the past year-and-a-half and, to a degree, is still happening.
The COVID-19 pandemic, of particular danger to senior citizens — and even more dangerous to those living in senior residential communities — has made life very difficult for residents of the community, and no less so for those who work there.
Since the pandemic began early last year, one Kavod resident has died of the virus, a person who had several other life-endangering conditions.
Klein estimates that there have been 25 infections among residents and a similar number among staff.
“We were very successful for awhile,” he says, “but then we slowly started seeing a couple of cases here and there.”
Well into the pandemic’s second year, and with the Delta variant prolonging and increasing the threat of infection, serious challenges remain, Klein and Summer say.
In August, 2021, more than 80% of Kavod residents have been fully vaccinated and nearly three quarters of staff have received their shots. Kavod has yet to mandate vaccinations for its staff and is waiting for government mandates before imposing that requirement.
“It’s a complicated issue,” Summer says. “Number one, you have people who say [the vaccine] is still an emergency-use authorization and don’t want to do it. Number two, recruitment is hard in this world, particularly for caregivers. If you want to draw that line — to tell people that the consequences of not being vaccinated is that they can’t work here — well, then you’ve got recruitment issues.”
Since early 2020 and continuing this summer, Kavod has undergone a constantly changing gauntlet of changes and restrictions in its effort to stay ahead of the virus.
At various times, differing levels of quarantine were put in place for staff and residents who had contracted the virus or had exposure to infected individuals; the communal dining room was closed and meals were delivered to residents’ rooms; grants were located, and help procured from Ekar Farm, to set up a food pantry inside the facility to discourage residents from going shopping in public; entry to the facility was restricted; most recreational and religious programming was diverted from in-person gatherings to livestreaming.
“We went from this point where we’d have over 250 people coming down every night for dinner,” Klein says, “and we were like, we can’t do that anymore. So we started delivering to the apartments.
“We then went to Zoom for a lot of our programming. We brought in outside entertainment, so instead of having performance in the building, we had people performing in the street and we had all kinds of music programs to try to keep people’s spirits up.
“And, knock on wood, it’s been at least three or four months since we had our last case. We haven’t been immune, but we we’ve done a really good job.
“Like everyone, we’re constantly watching what’s going on. With the Delta variant, we’re still being very, very careful. It’s definitely no time to relax.”
Summer emphasizes that Kavod has also taken “great interest in the staff,” focusing not only on workers’ health safety but their morale.
“We saw very, very little turnover of staff, which I think represented the fact that we have a great human relations department and we stayed focused. The health of the staff was just as important as the health of residents.”
Keeping up the morale of the isolated residents has been no less a challenge. Social workers, mental health counselors and Rabbi Booth-Nadav have been on the vanguard of that effort, Klein and Summer say.
Providing entertainment and safe-distanced visits have been helpful, as have such details as making sure that residents were provided the opportunity to have their hair done onsite and allowing limited access to Kavod’s communal garden, they add.
“All those things add up,” Klein says, acknowledging that it has nonetheless been a struggle. “It’s been really tough.”
At the same time, the pandemic has been a collective learning experience for the community.
“One thing we learned was to be a lot more nimble,” Klein says. “Our leadership team would meet once a week prior to COVID; once we got into COVID, it was a daily meeting. What’s going on? What do we need?
“The other thing we learned was that with PPE equipment, you better make sure you have a lot of extra in reserve. We’ve done a better job with that and now we have more should something happen in the future.
“The other thing that we learned is that education and communication are really important. We were sending letters out, posting things on every hallway. We didn’t want staff or residents to be in ignorance of what was going on. The more we can give them the education, the more you can tell them what you want and what they need to do, it makes for a better outcome.”
Summer adds that much was learned about the value of having good staff and leadership in an institution such as Kavod.
“We learned that the investment we made — and I don’t mean financial investment, but in the heart — in bringing in a good team paid off. The team that was in place at Kavod — Michael and his team — were the right people at the right time to deal with this.
“But we also learned that you have to have redundancy in leadership, so for every top person, you have to be prepared that tomorrow they’re going to call and say, ‘I got COVID.’ So what is the ability of the person below to step up?”
The staff and leadership at Kavod, Summer says, have proven themselves capable of performing the necessary tasks, even in light of the risks they face themselves.
“We had a great team,” he says, “and that great team stepped up. We have the same team today and that team will take us into the future.”
The Future
As much change as Kavod has experienced in the last 50 years, its leaders anticipate even more in the next 50.
“The future is not facility-based services,” Summer says plainly, “but community-based services. As we’re pivoting to what comes next, it will be a lot more community-based services, not unlike what’s happening in the hospital industry as well.”
To some degree, as evidenced by the success of Kavod on the Road, that’s already beginning to happen, but Kavod’s leaders expect that curve to intensify.
Klein projects the paradigm in personal terms.
“I would want more senior services brought into my home,” he says. “I would not necessarily look at an institution as my first thing. There’s always going to be that need for that — for people who need those services within a building — but there are also going to be more of those saying, ‘Hey, I would prefer to maintain my independence as long as I can.’”
Programs to provide support for those who want to age in place, like home health care, is clearly the wave of the future when it comes to where the senior care industry is heading.
For Kavod to stay ahead of that curve, Summer says, it will have to work hard to maintain its financial stability through good management and by utilizing its resources wisely.
“But as we go forward, I think our challenge is finding out how we are going to evolve. Society has recognized that if people have opportunities other than going into a facility with other people, they should take advantage of it, but they still want the services to go along with that.”
The wisdom of pivoting toward a more community-based model has been further underscored, Summer says, by the recent pandemic experience. Having a medically vulnerable community reside in such a densely occupied environment might not be the best idea under such circumstances.
Planning for those changes, he adds, is already underway.
“What I want to do this year is put in place a very robust, strategic planning process so that my successor will then have a plan and a roadmap going forward. We’re looking at what other future services should we provide and how do we provide them? What are the funding streams for doing that?”
Klein adds several additional important questions to the list.
“Even though we have 400 people at Kavod, we probably reach another 1,200 people, primarily Jewish seniors in the community. We’re doing that through Kavod on the Road, through educational and activity programs, but what else will they need?
“Could they benefit from home care? Could they benefit from case management? Could they benefit from other resources we could provide through partnerships with other groups?
“We’re looking more and more into how we can bring services to seniors in the community. We need to find the right balance between what we’re currently doing at our facilities and what else we can be doing.”
“I feel really good that with the board and senior staff we have in place we will continue to grow and do well,” he says. “There will always be new leaders to take us further on our journey.”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.
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