Senior Home Care Cooperative

Annual Report for 1997

(Last updated 29 September 1998) In 1997, the Senior Home Care Alternative worked toward achieving its first goal -- that of developing a Senior Home Care Cooperative in the Chicago area.

Specific accomplishments were as follows:

• The Senior Home Care Alternative (SHCA), with the assistance of our lawyer Doug Weinberg, filed an amendment to the Articles of Incorporation and, subsequently, an application for tax-exempt status. In September, we received an initial determination from the IRS that the SHCA qualified as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.

• The SHCA submitted nine proposals for funding and, in September, received a grant from the Franciscan Foundation for $2,500.

• The SHCA renewed its membership in the Chicago Mutual Housing Network and had several meetings with the director, Rob Sadowsky, to learn about structuring housing cooperatives and discuss specific strategies for the Senior Home Care Cooperative.

• We visited a small group home of the Reba Place Fellowship which provides a supportive living arrangement for elderly and/or disabled members.

• We developed an initial draft of guidelines for the cooperative care component of the Senior Home Care Cooperative in the following three areas: (1) requirements and responsibilities of residents and families; (2) criteria and procedures for selecting residents and families; (3) criteria and procedures for removing from the Cooperative residents and families who do not live up to the terms of their contract;

• We identified organizations and persons who could be referral sources for families who might wish to join the Cooperative, started a data base for this information, and made initial contacts with these people. A pamphlet describing the Senior Home Care Cooperative was created, printed, and distributed to the contacts.

• We spent quite a bit of time rethinking and reworking the structure of the Cooperative based on the feedback received from the many people contacted thus far in the development of the Cooperative - grantors, bankers, staff at resource and referral agencies and Board members. The suggestion to make the Cooperative smaller, in particular, seemed to provide the best solution to some of the problems we were facing.

• The Executive Directors attended a monthly series of accounting workshops held by the CPAs for the Public Interest, and continued to gather other information relevant to the project from many sources.