Episode 42: Helping Folks with Home Repairs - Rebuilding Together Rogue Valley
Host: Jamie Callahan
Guest: Kendyl Kaplan, Executive Director, Rebuilding Together Rogue Valley
JAMIE CALLAHAN: Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast. Our goal is to simplify aging. Society grooms us to plan for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement, where the rubber meets the road? Perhaps you've had a stroke, or you've been diagnosed with cancer, or maybe you're forgetting things and now you have dementia. That's our area of expertise, and we are here to share our insight.
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Hi, this is Jamie Callahan, and I'm in the studio today with Kendyl Kaplan. I am so excited to have her here today because I have the utmost confidence in the program that she is the executive director for. It is incredible. We refer tons of business to them. So Kendyl, tell us a little bit about you and tell us who is Rebuilding Together Rogue Valley.
KENDYL KAPLAN: Thank you for the question, and thank you for having me. I'm also really excited to be here. I am the executive director. I've been here for about five years, and it's a funny story how I got here. But we have been growing and changing over a period of time, and who we are is—that is the question we've had to answer that many times. I think a lot of nonprofits have to answer that question. Who are you? What do you do, and what are you going to focus on? So we made quite a few changes, but we are a nonprofit that serves older adults with disabilities, and usually they're low-income living in a rural area. We serve them by providing durable medical equipment, like grab bars, wheelchair ramps, railings, and things like that to try to prevent avoidable falls and keep people at home.
JAMIE: I love that. So we've been on this ride together for a while. Yeah. And I love that when I first started engaging with the organization, you guys were doing huge projects like replacing roofs on houses, and you've changed to a program where you're doing smaller things, but you have the ability to do a one-touch. Explain to us what that is.
KENDYL: Yeah. The one-touch is really exciting, and what you said is also an important part of our journey. One thing that we found was that the need of seniors everywhere, but here where we are, is something that is so multifaceted. There's so many pieces. There's always something. Once you start serving seniors, you are going to get calls for all kinds of things.
JAMIE: No kidding.
KENDYL: And of course, being people that are in this industry, we want to do all those things. So we had a really hard time with having to look at who we are and essentially decide we are going to do specific things, do them very well, create a program around it, and not do the other things.
JAMIE: Understood. Yeah, I understand. Trust me, nobody can understand that better than I can, although I still try to meet everybody's needs, but it's not always possible. Tell us a little bit more about you, like how did you become the executive director and what motivated you to lead this organization?
KENDYL: Yeah, I started off in another nonprofit. I was working for a local nonprofit that did mostly immediate-need type stuff. So these are people that were injured right now and needed help getting home or getting to the hospital or whatever it was. And when I saw the opportunity to do something that was more preventative, I was like, "Yeah, let's do that. I would love to see some of these things not happen at all." And I actually came on board as Manager of Operations and Outreach. So my job was to let people know who we are and what we do and make sure that the clients are coming in, which has never been a problem. Unfortunately.
JAMIE: And fortunately.
KENDYL: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And when we needed an executive director, the joke I always go with in my head is I was both the least and most qualified person to do the job because lots of things were going on prior to that. I was one of the most senior people there at the time, which doesn't say much. And somebody had to do it. Nobody knows the organization—this particular affiliate that I have—like I do, and that makes me the person, I think, that can carry it forward. However, I don't have executive director experience, or I didn't before this.
JAMIE: How long have you been doing this now?
KENDYL: Five years.
JAMIE: Oh my gosh. Wow. It has been, like I said, it has been a beautiful ride.
KENDYL: A beautiful ride.
JAMIE: Thank you. Safe at Home. So it's a program that helps seniors and people with disabilities stay safe in their own homes. Tell us more about what that is.
KENDYL: Yeah, there is a lot of attention on the fact that falls are the leading cause of death for seniors. There's a lot of attention on what do people need once they're leaving the hospital—it's time to outfit their home because now they had a fall and all of a sudden they can't ambulate the way that they did before. But Rebuilding Together is really focused on how do we prevent that and make sure that the home is ready for the aging process in its entirety as much as possible. There are some people that we talk to who say, "Oh, I'm just more tired than I used to be," or "I have hypertension and sometimes I have to sit down or take a rest mid-walk." "No, I haven't fallen yet, and I still am very active in the community, but I can feel it coming. And I would really like to stay home for as long as I can." So we try to modify the home so that we don't have falls happening that are totally preventable. And there's a lot of benefits to that. One of it is, of course, having people stay at home. That's very simple.
JAMIE: Sure.
KENDYL: Another part of it is, of course, the cost on our healthcare community to have these falls that could have been avoidable, the cost on the EMS personnel—having EMS go out there just to pick someone up off the floor is not a good use of resources. And then also you get into mental health and generational wealth—being able to stay at your home so that you don't have to do any type of spend-down, pass down your property to your family, create that kind of generational cycle of building up property and assets and all of that.
JAMIE: Sure. Absolutely. So when you talk about the folks that you serve, and they are sometimes low-income, how do you decide which homes or individuals qualify for the services?
KENDYL: For the most part, that's decided by the funders. Everything that we do is funded by either grants or donations. So if we have a grant that says we only want to serve people who are 62 and above and live in Jackson County, they have to own their home, and if it's a trailer or a mobile home, they have to own the land that it's on too, then those are the only people we serve with that funding.
JAMIE: Sure.
KENDYL: And if we get something that's a little bit more unrestricted, then we serve those people, too.
JAMIE: I love that. So you serve a broad area across Southern Oregon. What is it? How big is the region?
KENDYL: We serve Jackson, Josephine, and Curry County. And it feels like it's growing every day. All the time there's calls we get from places like Douglas County and all kinds of other areas that need more help. The other thing that we have been diving into is being more intentional about the populations specifically that we're serving. So not just the elderly, but populations that need these services that it takes a little bit more time and trust to be able to serve them. The tribes is one of those—the Native American community, the Latinx community. These are groups of people who are very tight together with each other, and you definitely have to have that trust that you want to serve them and there's no tricks or anything going on. So we're trying to be more intentional about reaching as many people in this community as we can.
JAMIE: That's amazing. And I do know from experience that it is hard to reach some of those groups, but there's nothing truer than once you establish trust and you've proven that you can serve that population, they do begin to lean on you. And so I am hoping that you're having a lot of success there.
KENDYL: We're trying, yeah.
JAMIE: So I understand you have some new programs.
KENDYL: I do.
JAMIE: Tell us about those.
KENDYL: Thank you for asking. The first program is Ramp Rerun, and the goal of this program is essentially driving around—a lot of people will see that there's modular ramps that are not in use. They're pretty obvious they're not in use. And by modular, not custom wood, but they're usually metal of some kind. Those ramps are oftentimes provided by some type of government funding, like Medicaid, to somebody who needs it in order to go home from the hospital or whatever. And when somebody passes away or they move, a lot of times those ramps just hang out, and they could be really well-used for someone who can't afford a ramp right now.
JAMIE: No kidding. We discussed this a little bit earlier, and I said, I've often wondered, what happens with those modular ramps that someone made an investment in and now they're no longer needed or the house is sold—where do they go?
KENDYL: Yeah. Oftentimes they sit there. Honestly, I've seen them get donated to places, which is also wonderful. Goodwill sometimes. Our goal with this new program is to pick up those ramps, log in our system what size and whatever that we have. And then as people call and say that they need a ramp, instead of us waiting for funding, which oftentimes takes forever because it's an eight-to-one ratio usually on durable medical equipment versus ramp funding, we'll be able to actually pull from our storage and recycle those government dollars essentially, or whoever bought them, to serve an exponential amount of people.
JAMIE: It's incredible. Yeah. That is truly incredible. And you have another program as well that's new?
KENDYL: Yeah. We are looking at different ways to keep the nonprofit going. There's a lot of changes in the administration and funding federally for us. We've had to really look at what our model is for making sure that these services continue to exist. So we are doing a membership program, which will be membership to our handyman services.
JAMIE: Tell us more about how that works. And I'm really excited about this because when I look at my own life, my husband is quite a lot older than I am. I often wonder, because we live on this great big ranch and there are many things that go wrong on a regular basis, how does the program work?
KENDYL: The way the program works is you'll pay a membership fee and you'll get a certain amount of hours from a handyman who will be licensed and bonded and all that, of course, who will come out to your home and do those things for you. The way that it came up for me was I was talking to somebody who was a widow, and she said, "I miss him. Of course, I've got all these memories and feelings that I have to deal with, but on top of that, I don't know how to fix the sound that my door keeps making. It's creaking, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. And there's this little piece of siding in my kitchen that's peeling off," and just all these little things that a handyman could come in for an hour, two, three, whatever, and just help with some things around the house.
JAMIE: Understood. And it takes an ear like yours to really appreciate what's being shared with you in that moment. I can hear how meaningful this work is to you. Tell us a story of a life that's been changed because of your organization.
KENDYL: One of my favorite stories is a person who was referred to us by the fire department, and the fire department called and said, "We keep getting called out to this house because this person is falling in their trailer. But he will not leave the trailer. He's just falling. He wants to be put back on his bed, and he's like, 'I'm not going anywhere.'"
JAMIE: They hate those phone calls.
KENDYL: So good on you. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So we went out and talked to him, tried to help him out. We ended up helping with a handful of activities in the house. We did grab bars, we did railings, we did a transfer pole, shower bench, all these things. And what ended up happening was—nobody saw it coming, I don't think, because all of a sudden he had the confidence to move around. He started to feel like a person again. That's how he described it to me. And he decided one day that he was going to get up and go back to church, which he hadn't done in a really long time. And that was very meaningful to him.
JAMIE: Wow.
KENDYL: So he started going back to church, and now he leads a youth group. And he's out there. He's—
JAMIE: Oh my gosh.
KENDYL: Hardly ever home now because he is out working in the community. It's such a cool thing.
JAMIE: That is an incredible story. I want to give you an opportunity to share with everyone again the name of your organization and how to put in an application. How do we find you as a community?
KENDYL: Thank you. The organization is called Rebuilding Together Rogue Valley, and I realize that "rebuilding" is one word. However, the website suggests that's not the case. So the acronym on the website is rbtrv.org. And if you go on there, there'll be an apply button. Also a donate button exists on there, too.
JAMIE: So they have to apply from the website.
KENDYL: Yes.
JAMIE: Okay. So looking ahead, what do you see in the future of your organization in the next five to 10 years?
KENDYL: I think that Rebuilding Together is going to become—I guess another change is rolling through, and we're going to become an organization that is self-sufficient, not dependent on insurance and Medicaid like we had been before. We're pivoting. We're making programs so that we can sustain ourselves. We'll continue to serve Medicaid clients and insurance clients, but we are definitely going to grow into something that keeps itself up, that has all kinds of programs for all kinds of people who want to do good work with us.
JAMIE: And just being on the outside and watching how much it's morphed into something that's really serving a larger part of the community, and just watching you really take it there, I can only imagine what's going to happen with you at the helm.
KENDYL: Thank you. It's very exciting.
JAMIE: Okay, so tell us again, how do we reach you? How do we fill out the application?
KENDYL: So the best way to reach us is rbtrv.org, and there is a donate button on there as well as an apply button. You can also find me on social media, Kendyl Kaplan, and Rebuilding Together Rogue Valley has a Facebook page and an Instagram. We also have a pro services program where if you hire contractors to do—I don't know, anything—painting, gutters, all that, those contractors will donate back to us. So if you're looking for that type of service, if you Google any of those services through Rebuilding Together, you'll be able to find us that way, too.
JAMIE: That's great. I didn't know that you guys did that. I love that. Well, Kendyl, thank you so much for being here today. It's always a treat getting to hang out with you a little bit, but I absolutely love the program. I've been one of the biggest cheerleaders for the longest time, so thank you.
KENDYL: Yes, you have. Thank you so much.
JAMIE: Have a wonderful day.
Thank you for listening to the Team Senior Podcast. We're here every week sharing new and relevant information. Remember that we're just a phone call away. Team Senior can be reached at 541-295-8230. Again, 541-295-8230. Until next time, this is Jamie Callahan.
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