GBO NEWS: Aging Fellowship Deadline Extended; “Live?Die?Kill?: Los Angeles”; Gerontologist Evicted Seniors; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
Aug. 20, 2015 — Volume 15, Number 12
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. You can subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge simply by sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. You’ll receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Feline Liberation Movement Protests Dog Days.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: Application Deadline EXTENDED for Journalists in Aging Fellows to September 2; *** 2015 California Health Data Journalism Fellowship
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: Live, Love, Marry, 81.
3. THE STORYBOARD: “Live?Die?Kill?:Los Angeles” by Karen Michel for KCRW-FM Santa Monica; *** “S.F. Landlord Evicting Seniors Who Helped Her Ailing Aunt” – a landlord who is a gerontologist, who refused interview requests by Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle–plus the subsequent settlement story.
4. GOOD SOURCES: Urban Institute’s “A New Vision for Long-Term Care”; *** “Too Sick to Care: Direct-Care Workers, Medicaid Expansion, and the Coverage Gap,” from the PHI PolicyWorks advocacy group; *** The Pass It On Network: A Global Program Exchange for Positive Aging.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Application EXTENDED for Journalists in Aging Fellows to September 2. Okay, Gen Beatles, we know you just haven’t had a nano-instant to move that fellowship proposal from an inkling to actual ink – even though we only want 1-2 pages. But an all expenses-paid trip to Orlando and a $1,500 stipend in your account—plus the extra sparkle on your résumé is sure appealing. Oh, but the deadline was this Friday! No longer – we’ve now extended it to Sept. 2 — so no more excuses.
This year we will have at least 15 new Fellows, and each will receive that nifty stipend plus the paid trip to the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Scientific Meeting in Orlando, Fla., Nov. 18-22. All of that comes thanks, so far, to the Silver Century Foundation, The SCAN Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the Archstone Foundation and the Retirement Research Foundation.
Here’s the deal — the Journalists in Aging Fellows program, is a collaboration between GSA and New America Media (NAM), in conjunction with the Journalists Network on Generations, publisher of GBONews.org. Launched in 2010, this fellowship for journalist at both ethnic media and mainstream news outlets (including freelancers) has generated over 300 stories in all media formats. Generational topics have ranged from the impact of gentrification on urban elders to Navajo heritage artists passing their traditions to new generations.
The 2016 class of Fellows will attend GSA’s Orlando conference at the Disney Swan & Dolphin Resort (near Epcot Center), the week before Thanksgiving. Previous Fellows have worked with mainstream media from US News & World Report to public radio stations from Alaska to New York, and ethnic media from Huffington Voces to Sing Tao Daily in NYC. Many fellows have also been with news dailies or magazines nationwide.
A panel of journalists and experts in aging select the Fellows. So, visit the fellowship website for an application form, details on the program and a continuously updated list of fellowship stories.
At GSA, which is an academic society, not a lobbying group, Fellows will have access to more than 4,000 experts in aging attending the conference and hundreds of sessions and papers on just about every topic under the aging sun. The society also publishes leading peer-reviewed journals with great source material and leads on experts for reporters.
The program is co-directed by Todd Kluss, GSA’s senior manager of communications, and GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman, also senior editor of NAM’s ethnic elders newsbeat and national coordinator of the Journalists Network on Generations.
Those with questions can contact Paul at NAM: (415) 503-4170 ext. 133; e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org, or Todd at GSA, (202) 587-2839; tkluss@geron.org.
*** 2015 California Health Data Journalism Fellowship: USC Annenberg School of Journalism has set Oct. 16 as the application deadline for its new California Health Data Journalism Fellowship. They will select 10 California journalists for the all-expenses-paid program. It includes a $1,000 reporting stipend.
“The Fellowship is designed for reporters who want to learn how to harness and analyze data that can shape health care decision-making, policy and legislation across California and beyond.” The program aims to help reporters mine healthcare data “to reveal key insights essential to high impact journalism,” according to their website.
Not only will Fellows be immersed in California health data about procedures, providers, costs, conditions and demographics, but the program will also bring in each Fellow’s editor to participate in a half-day project brainstorming session with other Fellows and editors. The Fellowship will be held Dec. 2-5 in Los Angeles.
Before applying, reporters are required to talk with one of their staff members or Senior Fellows to discuss their idea for a Fellowship project. Please contact Martha Shirk at CAHealth@usc.edu well in advance of the deadline to arrange a conversation.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Poet William Carlos Williams once wrote that sometimes “old age adds as it takes away,” and community-health educator and writer Aurora Cudal has, at age 81, just added a new name. As of her wedding day two weeks ago, her byline is now Aurora S. Cudal-Rivera. Long a contributing writer and columnist for the Filipino Press in San Diego, she lost her husband, Winlove Cudal, two years ago.
She e-mailed GBONews, “Many things happened in my life since the last time we met. The highlight is my marriage to a man whom I met 62 years ago as a young graduate of the University of the Philippines. We had successful marriages, which ended with the death of our respective spouses. From the Philippines to California, love prevails.” The groom is Judge (Ret.) Peter C. Rivera, Jr.
Talk about global-local—and a judge, no less. Cudal-Rivera, who also chairs the National Federation of Filipino American (NaFFAA) Associations, posted photos of the newlyweds on her Facebook page.
As for newsroom friends who understandably commented on seeing this that it’s “so cute” — Well, no. My grandson, who turned three the same day of Cudal-Rivera’s marriage, is cute. Aurora and Peter’s union means hope for the rest of us.
Onward and ageward—successfully and happily to the newly weds.
3. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Live?Die?Kill?: Los Angeles,” by public radio producer Karen Michel, is a half-hour program about dying and death in America—with the emotional twist that after starting the documentary, she learned that her father was terminally ill. He became the center of this illuminating, but not always grim story.
The new production was featured in July on KCRW-FM Santa Monica’s independent documentary series “UnFictional” with story editing and sound mix by Bob Carlson, plus an assist by “Yomo the dog therapist.”
Sound—shocking, explosive—was the resonant impetus for Michel’s documentary work on the end of life. On September 11, 2001, she lived in Brooklyn, close enough to New York City’s World Trade Center to be startled awake by the crashing of the first plane into the Twin Towers. According to her website, “That experience sent her on a nationwide exploration of what really matters to us. She travelled to locations around the country and asked three questions of the people she met: What do you live for? What would you die for? What would you kill for?”
In the ensuing years, she asked those three questions for productions in New York, North Carolina (where she has taught at Duke) and Boston, before returning to the city of her youth, Los Angeles. That became the most difficult production of all.
Starting in 2010, Michel interviewed dozens of LA residents, young and old. This time, though, her father began to decline. Marty Michel finally died at age 98 in his apartment of 50 years in 2012. She e-told GBONews, “My dad died nearly three years ago, or I couldn’t have finished that radio doc. I started working on it when he was quite alive and then, as he started declining (in his mid-90s) the piece shifted.” She decided to put the three questions to him, which you’ll hear him address thoughtfully, if sadly at moments.
Michel realized that she couldn’t honestly continue with the other material she had until her own living example of her subject reached its conclusion. “I had to wait for him to die and then–I just couldn’t.” In the meanwhile, some of those she’d interview and would include in the final program also died. She admitted, “Listening to that while I worked on this program was incredibly emotionally wrenching. But I had to finally get it done.”
Mind you, it’s not all about her personal grief. After all, it’s that peculiar place, the City of Angels. The program opens with her visit to the Museum of Death, where one can hear the creepy refrain of Charles Manson singing, “… I’m so bad ….”
Michel blogged, about recording her father, “In his 90s, he cried while talking about his impending death. It was only the second time I’d ever seen him cry; the first was when he talked about having to give up golf because his balance had gone and he couldn’t swing a club anymore. No golf = death.”
While continuing her interviews, she found his answer to killing “a bit scary.” She continued, “He said that if anyone ever did anything to me they’d be dead. He’d arrange it. And I didn’t doubt it. In World War II he had killed, sometimes with a knife, not that he talked about it. He did say he’d been a gigolo in Florida as a young man and worked for the mob as an older one. As a child he spent his mornings before school stunning the cows on their way to his parents slaughterhouse, behind their home. He grew up killing.”
Michel, who has produced cultural features over the years for the likes of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, also develops documentary performance pieces. She blogged, “As I look forward to making ‘Live?Die?Kill?: L.A’ a live performance, and put this story to bed, I catch myself making a gesture my father often made: bending my right wrist, and using my hand, paw-like, to brush something, usually nothing, away from my face. A face that looks a lot like his.”
*** “S.F. Landlord Evicting Seniors Who Helped Her Ailing Aunt,” by San Francisco Chronicle “City Insider” columnist Heather Knight (August 16) should be a shocker for the world of gerontology. There’s nothing new about the impact of gentrification on seniors nationwide, with landlords doing the damnedest to kick out longtime (sometimes rent-controlled) tenants whose inconvenient presence blocks their ability to go market rate or rake in Airbnb rentals.
But in this case, the owner of an apartment house in San Francisco’s toney North Beach district is Annlia Paganini Hill, PhD. Project Scientist Biostatistician and Epidemiologist Department of Neurology at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. She is co-investigator of The 90+ Study. Its website describes the research as “one of the largest studies of the oldest-old in the world,” including more than 1,600 people. The study’s site adds that it aims to address “a public health challenge to promote the quality as well as the quantity of life.”
So why has someone building her research career on the vulnerability of the old been evicting tenants since she inherited the building in 2012? Neither Paganini Hill nor her attorneys would reply to Knight’s repeated telephone of e-mail interview requests.
Knight reported that Paganini Hill, who lives in beautiful Laguna Beach on the Orange County coast not far from Disneyland, started evicting tenants. Two, however, remained and decided to fight her attempts to oust them using the state’s controversial Ellis Act. That law enables landlords to vacate the rental market and sell units as condos. Getting “Ellised” out has been a major tool for evictions in California cities like San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Monica, where the tech-boom has been driving up housing demand and rents with it.
According to Knight, as Paganini Hill’s aunt declined, Theresa Flandrich, now 60 and a 30-year tenant of the building, provided substantial caregiving for the elder. The aunt eventually died in 2010, at age 78
And the plot thickens: Flandrich is “an organizer with Senior and Disability Action, who tried to help seniors remain in their buildings,” says Knight’s Chronicle story. Meanwhile, Flandrich is among thousands of older adults around the nation on waiting lists for low-income housing. After two years, she has had no luck. (Hint, hint – Have you done a story on the affordable housing disaster for older people in your community?)
The other tenant, Silvio Maniscalco, 68, now pays $800 monthly after living in the building for 18 years. (Flandrich pays $600 after three decades.) The current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the City by the Bay is $3,200 a month. Other gerontologists, who have promoted working later in life to help seniors afford their retirement, might look more closely at their local rental listings. Actually, Maniscalco, Knight reported, does work part time as a North Beach bartender.
Finally, on Aug. 18, four days after the story appeared online, Knight posted “2 North Beach Tenants, Landlord Settle Ellis Act Eviction Dispute.” Knight e-mailed GBONews, though, due to confidentiality, “all the news we could get is she is paying the tenants an undisclosed sum to vacate by the end of February.” The buy-out is a fairly typical resolution these days in San Francisco, although many question how long these lump sums will last, and how far away seniors must move. Good questions.
By the way, UC Irvine lists Paganini Hill’s contact as 949-768-3635; e-mail: apaganin@uci.edu. Maybe she’ll answer your question, you know, the one about hypocrisy in the annals of gerontology.
4. GOOD SOURCES
*** “A New Vision for Long-Term Care,” is a blog (July 15) by Urban Institute scholar and journalist Howard G. Gleckman, which begins, “Today, America’s vision of long-term care is grim. Supports and services for frail elders or younger people with disabilities are delivered in a fragmented, disorganized way that puts recipients of care at risk for serious harm or even death, and likely wastes billions of dollars.”
Gleckman continues, “Indeed, if the goal of supports and services is to provide the best possible quality of life for those who need personal assistance, we are doing almost everything wrong. But there is a better way. Imagine a system that focuses on personal assistance rather than needless or harmful medical interventions, fosters independence and choice rather than institutional or highly regulated and constrained home care, and builds on existing support systems such as families and communities, rather than leaving people isolated and alone.”
That better way is outlined in a July report from the Long-Term Financing Collaborative, to which Gleckman belongs and that he describes as “an ad hoc group whose members represent consumers, providers, the insurance industry, and a broad ideological spectrum of policy experts.” It’s certainly a very prestigious, although centrist group.
For reporters, the Collaborative’s 12-page document–which does not propose specific reforms–offers a policy framework for thinking about the delivery of long-term services and supports. That is, the “four key pillars” the consensus document offers provide a kind of checklist journalists can use on which to base questions for evaluating particular legislation and proposals as they come up. Those four principles, writes Gleckman, include: “Better integrating supports and services with medical care; supporting families; supporting paid caregivers; and leveraging existing institutions such as neighborhoods, faith communities and workplaces.”
*** “Too Sick to Care: Direct-Care Workers, Medicaid Expansion, and the Coverage Gap,” is a new report showing state-by-state that nearly a quarter of the nation’s 2.2 million paraprofessional health care aides “are shut out of Medicaid eligibility because their states have refused to expand the program under the terms of the Affordable Care Act.” It comes from PHI PolicyWorks, an advocacy organization “working to strengthen the direct-care workforce.”
The report explains, “ACA included a provision meant to incentivize states to expand eligibility for Medicaid programs to individuals with household incomes up to 138 percent of the [Federal Poverty Line] FPL. In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of this new requirement. In many states, the decision not to expand Medicaid resulted in a gap between current Medicaid eligibility and 100 percent FPL, the income level at which an individual or family qualifies for subsidies to purchase health insurance in the state health care exchanges.”
Workers in the 21 “non-expansion” states, fall into the “coverage gap,” the report says; they earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid in their states, but not enough to qualify for federal subsidies that would help them buy insurance on health care exchanges.
Got questions? Contact Deane Beebe, dbeebe@phinational.org; office: 718-928-2033 cell: 646-285-1039
*** The Pass It On Network, tags itself “A Global Program Exchange for Positive Aging.” But it could just as well be, “Elders of the world, unite!” Co-founder, Jan Hively, PhD, states, “It’s time for elders to mobilize and preserve a livable planet for future generations!”
A “grassroots network of adult thought leaders,” according to Hively, a former University of Minnesota gerontologist and Encore Purpose Prize Fellow, Pass It On is an NGO she developed with Moira Allan, 67. The former journalist coordinated the organization, Le Cercle des Seniors Actifs, the French affiliate of the U.S. based 2Young2Retire network. Hively now lists herself as “a young octogenarian from Cape Cod,” where she resides; Allan, originally from South African, has lived in Paris for 35 years.
The group focuses on positive aging and, among other things, is developing an online directory of guides to encourage program replication around the globe that can be adapted to local language, culture and needs.
Hively and Allan have assembled a very distinguished group of advisors and country liaisons in Argentine, Australia, Canada, Belgium, India, European nations, Russia and elsewhere, although they are working their way toward Asia and hoping to widen their range more in South and Central America.
Although it’s a formative group, which the pair started in 2008, it’s one to watch among non-establishment innovators in aging. The network is designed to coordinate programs aimed, as their website states, at “encouraging older adults to be proactive in support of all of the factors contributing to healthy aging: finding passion and purpose, creative expression, meaningful work, lifelong learning, community recognition and accessibility, physical and mental exercise.”
Pass It On is slowly building a linked list of programs and international resources — an odd but interesting lot of organizations in some countries, websites in more, books, videos, and so on.
Hively is now in Massachusetts at 508-957-2620 (cell: 952-388-2713); Skype: janhively; e-mail: hivel001@umn.edu. Allan is reachable at +33 699 527 374; Skype: twilbee; e-mail: moiraallan@yahoo.fr.
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The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO News readers are invited to visit the NAM website, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2015, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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