Where would you want to live if you needed daily assistance? In your home, of course. Bright House aims to be that home for 14 lucky full-time assisted living residents, offering medically-skilled care in a respectful, self-sustaining community, and offering skilled nursing care for short-term residents. On our beautiful, newly remodeled 6 acre property (the former Wayfield Bed and Breakfast) in the small college town of Middletown, CT, Bright House brings together decades of experience and innovative, alternative visions of the potential in our elderly family members' latest years. In our first five years, we will establish a new kind of Elder Care model based on the idea that the elderly are fully-realized persons, with ideas, thoughts, and experiences which matter.
Can you help us to realize this goal?
1.1 Objectives
For our first year, we have four financial objectives:
- To raise adequate funding for start-up.
- To fill all of the rooms in the main house over the course of six months.
- To open the Skilled Nursing Facility, and maintain it at 9 to 10 rooms occupied for 25 days per month thereafter.
- Begin development implementation for the ongoing funding needs of years two through five.
We have other, non-financial objectives as well:
- To provide a warm, comfortable, safe and engaging home for up to 14 permanent residents. Ongoing feedback through the resident House Councils will give us a weekly update on our progress.
- To provide skilled medical care in a similarly respectful atmosphere to our temporary Medicare residents.
- To provide adequate training, mentoring and recompense to our caregiving staff to create job satisfaction.
1.2 Mission
At Bright House, we promote the dignity and self-worth of all of our residents, and strive to give them excellent quality of life, as defined by the residents, individually and as a group. To that end, we encourage resident group decision-making through the House Councils, access to all areas of their homes here at Bright House, and self-determination in activities, socialization, and food preferences. Bright House is not just a caregiving facility—it is their home, and their community.
We also value the time, skills, and expert opinions of our staff. We are committed to providing fair and living wages, reasonable, structured work schedules, and clear duties and spheres of rights and responsibilities for each team member. We do not expect staff to do work for which they are not trained; we do expect them to share their suggestions for improving any aspect of Bright House working operations or caregiving. We aim to provide jobs which not only provide sustenance for our workers' families, but also allow them a space to make a difference in the world around them, through caring and expert assistance to our community's most vulnerable members.
1.3 Keys to Success
We have identified four keys to success for Bright House:
- We offer more resident-oriented, small-scale, home-model care than our competitors;
- Our innovative use of Elder Assistants lowers the cost of providing this care considerably;
- Our fair wages and team structure lower dissatisfaction, and thus turnover rates among our staff;
- Our on-site Skilled Nursing Facility ensures continuity of care when our residents need more intensive assistance.
