Cafe Plus: Create an Ageless Place for Older Adults With Retail Appeal
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Your Price : $59.00

When designing the Café Plus model, the goal was to create a community venue for older adults with a new kind of experience. The challenge? How to attract people into an older adult venue for them to benefit from services, programs and resources. The solution? Approach the challenge indirectly, by taking an everyday activity, such as eating, and connecting it with an environment that provides renewal, creates potential and offers support—all in a venue with retail appeal to avoid institutional stigma.

Our speaker used the idea of creating a restaurant with tasty food, good customer service and affordable prices and connected it with resources, learning and wellness programs aimed at older adults. The Café Plus model connects to the community by getting end-user input in the initial development phase, opening the restaurant to the public, developing strong partnerships, developing community projects and serving as a hub for activities. Speaker Betsie Sassen will show you how the Café Plus model works in facilities she works with and share ideas on how you can apply this strategy to your environments for aging.




Learning Objectives

After this program, participants will:

 

 

  • Gain a basic understanding of how the Cafés work and the services that are offered;
  • Understand the importance of the physical layout and design in creating an “ageless” environment and attracting customers to programs;
  • Be able to show the importance of a strong customer service orientation in the Café Plus model;
  • Learn how the Café Plus model can be used to attract a younger older adult;
  • See how the model can be adopted by other types of organizations.

  



About the Speaker




Betsie Sassen
Executive Director, Café Replication, Mather Lifeways

Betsie Sassen is the Executive Director of Café Development for Mather LifeWays in Evanston, Illinois. She oversees the operations of three Mather LifeWays' — More Than a Café locations located on northwest and southeast sides of Chicago. In addition to overseeing café operations in the Chicagoland area, Ms. Sassen also consults with other organizations nationally and internationally interested in replicating the Café Plus model.

Prior to joining Mather LifeWays, Ms. Sassen's professional experience over the past ten years includes managing an adult day care program, supervising a long-term care facility, and managing a large hospital senior membership and community health program. Ms. Sassen has her Bachelor's Degree in Nursing from Michigan State University and a Master's Degree in Nursing: Health Systems Management from Loyola University Chicago. She has presented at more than 17 national conferences.