Greene County's Terry McGee Ward Goes from One Extreme to the Other on the Aging Spectrum

Dec. 13, 2012 - PRLog -- In keeping with the Sage Commission and the Governor’s consolidation plan, Greene County has taken the “everyone is aging” axiom to heart by merging two bureaus – youth and aging.

“Technically we’re the Department of Human Services with a youth and an aging bureau,” said Terry McGee Ward, Executive Director, who oversees both. Terry is relatively new to the Aging Network. She was hired as Executive Director of both the aging and youth bureaus. The two merged formally in July of 2012.

“The two groups are more similar than people think. There’s poverty in both groups. There’s a need for services in both. It’s dealing with the human population. You modify for the age but it’s still human services,” Terry said.

Terry’s career began in finance in New York City but she moved up to the Catskill area in 1988 and has since worked in the nonprofit sector and on the youth side of the agency before taking the lead for both.

“In an effort to familiarize the Aging Network with new Area Agency on Aging directors, the New York State Association of Area Agencies on Aging profiles a new director each month in the Association’s Aging NY electronic newsletter,” said Laura Cameron,” Executive Director of the NYS Association of Area Agencies on Aging (NYSAAAA)  Agency on Aging.

The Greene County Department for the Aging provides a network of over thirty distinct services designed to meet the needs of the 11,971 over 60 residents of Greene County, which is a whopping 24 percent of the Greene County population and expected to be 27 percent of the population by 2020. Services for seniors in the community are provided through a combination of sub-contracted programs and direct services provided by the department staff and volunteers. Volunteers are critical to Aging Network and were valued at $696,905 during the last fiscal year for Greene County alone.

The Greene County Department of Aging operates from six locations situated throughout the County to ensure maximum accessibility to its services. Services demand and usage have increased steadily over the past several years and are projected to continue to increase.

“We actually have a physical waiting list for case management, home health aids and home delivered meals for the first time in the agency’s history,” Terry said.

“When I first came here we didn’t keep a list. Now we’re keeping a list so that we can determine where the greatest need is. We’re hoping to do more with less by being creative. We’re actively trying to recruit volunteers for our home delivered meals program in order to comply with the two hour start to finish delivery time.

That becomes difficult when you have a population that’s so spread out.”
There has been a lot of change at the Greene County Department of Aging since Terry took over as Executive Director. First there was Hurricane Irene in 2011, four days before Terry took over.

“Following Hurricane Irene, we revamped our emergency plan. We need to be prepared so that if we get called on we know exactly what to do and we’re trying to teach everyone that,” Terry said. “We’re stressing the need for everyone to have at minimum 48 hours’ worth of supplies or an emergency pack in the event of an emergency.”

The merger of youth and aging in Greene County was complicated by the fact that the Older American’s Act mandates that the Area Agency on Aging be either a single purpose agency or a multi-purpose agency with separate and distinct divisions. The intent was to avoid short changing seniors. That works in a large metropolitan county or urban center but it becomes harder to manage in a small rural community, Terry said.

Some research revealed that due to the size of the population in the county, the duties of the Youth Bureau Director could be performed by the Advisory Board so that youth and aging could become  divisions under the umbrella of a multi-purpose agency, with separate directors for each.

“The unintended benefit of the merger,” Terry said, “is that there are more opportunities than anticipated to spread the work about aging services to our youth network and our referrals for youth services are now coming from a new segment of the population – grandparents.”

“It was really a year of growing pains, trying to figure out how we would fit in with the New York State Office for Aging and the office of Children and Youth Services,” Terry said. “I’m thankful we have people here who are good at their jobs. It makes the transition so much easier.”