Raising Senior Status

A picture in a Ziploc bag is worth more than 1,000 words. This is where Jill Pizitz-Hochstein keeps an old color snapshot of her grandparents protected and close at hand. It tells the story of Senior Smiles, the non-profit organization she and her husband, Erik Hochstein, launched to better the lives of the elderly. Sydney Cooper Senior Smiles is named after Jill’s grandfather, a pharmacist who died in 1987 before he could realize his dream of creating an affordable care facility for seniors. While Jill inherited her grandfather’s philanthropic nature, it’s her grandmother, Sylvia Cooper, now in her 90s, who gave Jill’s mission to aid seniors clear direction. ‘She would sit and cry all day,’ Jill recalls about her grandmother’s condition five years ago. Jill and her husband live in the Palisades; her grandmother resides many miles away in a nursing home in Stockton. ‘The staff’s solution was to give her more medication and put her back to bed.’ Jill, whose warmth and enthusiasm is peppered with steely determination, easily pinpointed the problem. Her grandmother, suffering from heart failure and dementia and confined to a wheelchair, was lonely. While Jill visited the person she describes as ‘her best friend’ every month, it clearly wasn’t enough. The devoted granddaughter sprang into action, reaching out to high schools near her grandmother’s facility hoping to find volunteer programs associated with the elderly. And when she came up empty, she pushed forward to create her own, training kids at a local Catholic high school how to befriend the elderly in nursing homes with the added incentive of enhancing their college application forms. ‘It’s a pretty simple formula,’ says Jill, whose teen volunteers began regular visits with her grandmother and others. ‘It’s about putting normalcy back into a sterile environment.’ The presence of loving volunteers, whose kindnesses included holding Sylvia’s hand and brushing her hair, worked magic in slowly transforming her emotional and physical well-being. ‘The staff lowered her anti-depressants, she doesn’t cry anymore and she’s healthier than ever,’ says Jill, who quickly realized how her grandmother’s case could be the model for improving the quality of life for seniors throughout California. After a slow beginning’Jill and Erik started out four years ago with five volunteers at one facility in Santa Monica’Senior Smiles now boasts over 500 volunteers who serve seniors in 27 facilities from San Diego to Tarzana as well as in private homes. The eventual goal is to expand Senior Smiles throughout the country. This noble aspiration is coupled with the Hochsteins’ busy ongoing work as private geriatric consultants. They help clients deal with family members afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and other debilitating conditions by matching them with appropriate caregivers and facilities. When Jill and her husband decided to join forces to create Senior Smiles and Cooper Senior Care Consulting (Erik runs the business and financial aspects of the organizations), both had good jobs in other fields. Jill was a director in an acute psychiatric hospital; Erik was a successful software engineer. ‘We were incredibly miserable working for other people,’ Jill explains. Both have degrees from USC and Pepperdine, and educated themselves as authorities on the special needs and care of seniors. About 90 percent of Senior Smiles volunteers are female, and many hail from countries such as Korea, where caring for elders is inherent in the culture. They arrive at the organization through Web searches for volunteer opportunities and by word-of-mouth. After training, they are matched with a senior and commit to visiting that person one hour each week. ‘We’re not Habitat for Humanity, where you can drive away once the project is over,’ Jill says to new recruits during a recent training session held at the Palisades-Malibu YMCA. ‘It should never feel like charity. It is about forming a lasting relationship.’ Stories abound about meaningful bonds between volunteers and seniors in the short history of Senior Smiles. Legendary among them is the ‘awakening’ of Eugenia. When Senior Smiles volunteers started work at an assisted living facility in downtown L.A., the nursing staff told them not to bother with Eugenia, a 99-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s and partial blindness, whom they considered a ‘lost cause.’ This directive sparked in Jill and her crew the desire to do just the opposite. Volunteers, mostly USC students, began visiting Eugenia regularly, reading and speaking to her. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed, her arms crossed, and she seemed oblivious to her new companionship. A couple weeks passed before a volunteer decided to bring in a CD player. It was the USC fight song that finally roused Eugenia, who began tapping her feet and bobbing her head to the music. She even lifted her head and smiled. Later, she begin speaking for the first time in five years. When a volunteer told a colleague that Eugenia had said ‘Hi,’ Eugenia chimed in and said ‘Yup.’ ‘When you give, you get much more back than what you’ve given.’ While this is a common sentiment among volunteers, these are the words of Claire Berger, a 96-year-old resident of Pacific Gardens in Santa Monica, who regales a steady stream of Senior Smiles volunteers with her wisdom and joie de vivre. With the help of one of her volunteers, Berger is close to finishing a novel. ‘I dictate and he types,’ she explains. Palisadian Lisa D’Andrea-Nunez and her sons Noah, 9, and Diego, 3, are among Berger’s ‘extended’ family who have visited regularly for the past two years. ‘We think of her as another grandmother,’ says D’Andrea-Nunez, who learned about Senior Smiles via a handout sent home from Village School. ‘It has broadened my life and filled in the empty spaces that were there,’ says Berger, who is welcomed into the Nunez family home for holidays and other occasions. Financing of the organization comes through private donations, grants and an occasional fundraiser. Offshoots include Baby Senior Smiles, which sends mothers and infants into senior facilities to meet with residents, and PAWWS (Pets Also Work With Seniors), which enlists dogs, cats and even rabbits as the program’s newest ambassadors of comfort. Not only has Senior Smiles affected the lives of countless seniors, it also has changed the career direction of many volunteers. All 10 of the original high school students Jill trained in Stockton to aid her grandmother have gone on to study premed, nursing or psychology. ‘We’re grooming a younger generation to be more respectful of the elderly,’ Jill says. ‘Seniors need the same love and attention that we all do.’ To find out more about Senior Smiles, call 459-0490 or go online to www.seniorsmiles.org.