SoFIA is proud to announce that our inaugural Senior Planet classes ended with nearly 20 new graduates. WLRN featured one such graduate in this story about how our innovative tech classes are doing more than teaching people how to use Facebook. Continue reading here. 

Did you receive our quarterly newsletter? If not, please sign up for it here. Below is SoFIA's News | Summer 2018...

​FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (August 1, 2018) – The South Florida Institute on Aging (SoFIA), a non-profit dedicated to helping South Florida’s aging community thrive, has announced the following new officers for its board of directors: Chair Lynn Brewer; Vice Chair Todd Radosevich; Secretary Ed French; and Treasurer Jim Walker.

“It is an honor to have such distinguished business and community leaders on our board who will lend invaluable management and oversight experience to SoFIA’s operations and evolution,” said SoFIA President and CEO Peter Kaldes, Esq. “The combined talent these individuals bring in the areas of sales and marketing, accounting, community lending finance and revenue management is an asset to our organization.”

Catherine Avgiris is chair of the policy council of the South Florida Institute on Aging.  As a former EVP and CFO of Comcast Cable, she knows how beneficial an IT help desk is. But not everyone has access to those resources, which is why in this Sun Sentinel opinion she supports SoFIA's Senior Planet technology training program: 
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"A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that slightly more than one in four internet users who
are  65 or older feel very confident when using computers, smartphones or other electronic devices to do the things they need to do online.

The rest are at risk of living in a digital desert by no fault of their own. The pace of basic technology is so rapid that they can’t keep up with the evolving technological changes underway in our society. Everyday online tasks that are a breeze for younger generations, like booking an Uber, banking online, uploading résumés or searching for affordable housing are confusing for the elderly. This divide creates a troubling paradigm of social and economic isolation for older Americans."

Continue reading here.

​By Peter Kaldes, SoFIA CEO
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 National Population Projections, by 2035, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. Here in South Florida, it is estimated that nearly one in four people will be at least 65 years old by 2040.

As we age, we are living longer: the Social Security Administration projects that men and women reaching 65 this year, can live until the respective ages of 84 and 86. One out of every four will live past 90 and one in 10 will celebrate a 95th birthday.
 
The aging population will affect health care in the increasingly important role of caregiver. In a paper entitled “What is the Physician’s Responsibility to a Patient’s Family Caregiver?” published with his co-author Mark J. Yaffe, M.D., in the May 2014 issue of AMA Journal of Ethics, Dr. David Barnard noted five systemic factors contributing to the increase in adult family caregivers, which I have paraphrased below:
 
1. The shift toward outpatient care and deinstitutionalization;
2. Economic pressures for early hospital discharge;
3. Reliance on hospitalists who are less likely to be familiar with the home situation to which they will discharge a patient;
4. The patchwork of fragmented social programs for home care;
5. The low-pay, high-turnover nature of home health care which diminishes the likelihood of a stable home health care workforce.
 
To which I would add a sixth factor: the projected shortage of home health care aides and personal care aides in a field which will need to add 1.2 million workers between 2016 and 2026, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

CBS4's Rick Folbaum sat down with SoFIA CEO on upcoming Caregiver Symposium and discussed the changing needs of seniors:

​A COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF LEADERS WORKING TO SOLVE SOCIAL AGING ISSUES
Network connects members who engage talented older adults to transform communities

For its 60th Anniversary issue, Florida Trends asked our CEO, Peter Kaldes, to identify some trends for what's to come in the future. He shared the following:

​By Andrea Bonkosky

We kick off Older American’s Month with some history on a very important piece of legislation, the Older American’s Act (OAA). Enacted in 1965, the OAA was born from an era of social unrest and civil rights advocacy. The decade between 1960 and 1970 was a critical time in the civil rights movement, which included protests and mass demonstrations in hopes of bringing social change and improving the quality of all people, including older adults.