By 2040 about 78 million Americans will be 65 or older, according to the Administration on Aging. In Oregon, lower birth rates combined with longer life expectancies means that Oregon’s population is rapidly growing older. The shift affects sectors like healthcare and affordable housing.
AGE+ is a nonprofit that advocates for older Oregonians. It’s pushing for a statewide task force to plan for Oregon’s changing demographics — a shift that can already be seen in the state’s rural areas. In 2023, South Morrow County Seniors Matter created a meal program for older residents. Now, the organization continues providing free weekly lunches to adults 60 and older along with classes and help navigating resources.
Stephanie Hooper is the president and CEO of AGE+. Jerry Conklin is the board chair of South Morrow County Seniors Matter. They join us with more about what an influx of aging residents could mean for the state.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. By the year 2040, about 78 million Americans will be 65 or older, according to the federal government. Oregon is a part of this transition. In just five years or so, for the very first time, there will likely be more Oregonians over the age of 65 than under the age of 18. What will this shift mean for healthcare, housing, social services or the tax base that supports so much of this?
I’m joined now by two people who are thinking about these issues right now. Stephanie Hooper is the president and CEO of AGE+, a nonprofit that advocates for older Oregonians. Jerry Conklin is a board chair of South Morrow County Seniors Matter, which created a meal program for older residents in 2023 that has since expanded to provide other services as well. Welcome to you both.
Stephanie Hooper: Thanks for having us.
Jerry Conklin: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Stephanie, first – how are Oregon’s demographics shifting right now? What are the stats that you think about most?
Hooper: What I think about most is that we are shifting to a pillar for an age structure, instead of a pyramid. There used to be very few older adults at the top and a lot of kids at the bottom. And now this is going to be an evenly distributed age population. But our systems aren’t ready, and our mindset isn’t there.
Miller: What do you mean when you say our systems aren’t ready? And mindset is a big part of it too, but systems-wise, what do you mean?
Hooper: Well, with that many more older adults being part of a community that may need services but also that have lots to contribute to our community, we’re not ready to embrace that human capital either. So really, it’s about our shift in our systems of how we’re going to care for people, how we’re going to leverage the gifts that they have so that all generations thrive.
Miller: It’s interesting the way you put that. It is an acknowledgement of what we will need to do as a society to help people who are older, but also saying that there are ways in which we could be, as a society, helped by older people that we are not currently taking advantage of.
Hooper: Absolutely. Workforce, for example, we have severe workforce shortages right now ...
Miller: We just heard about one very specific version of that – caregiving.
Hooper: But we are not looking at older adults as a solution. We keep looking at the pipeline of youth that is coming up, and how are we going to train them differently. Instead of, let’s also look at job redesign, look at retaining older workers in the workforce. They need to work, they want to work – and they can work. We just have to get beyond our own stereotypes.
Miller: Jerry Conklin, how did Seniors Matter begin?
Conklin: I’m a hospice chaplain, me and my co-worker visit hospice patients. And we just came to understand that Heppner didn’t have a senior meal site, other communities did, and we felt the need to do something about that.
Miller: How many people were you expecting would show up for a lunch on an average Tuesday?
Conklin: Well, there had been a senior meal site here before, it had closed because of COVID. And our understanding was there was about 40 people. That’s kind of what we thought might happen.
Miller: How many people now show up on a regular basis?
Conklin: I’m in the room where we meet right now, speaking to you. We have room for 75. It’s full. Week in, week out, we fill this room in our little community with people. They love to be here. They’ll come in, and they’re chatting away with friends. We feed them a free meal. It’s a wonderful atmosphere.
Miller: What do you provide besides the free meal?
Conklin: We didn’t really know how that was gonna all come about. But since then, seniors in rural communities have a unique set of needs. For example, they need training in technology, so we started computer classes. They need help with aging-related issues, so we’ve done classes on aging well, on dementia. We have EMS people that come here once a month and do vital sign checks to check on their health. A lot of seniors are veterans, we started a once a month veterans lunch. Transportation is a huge problem for some seniors who don’t have cars, who can’t drive on their own for whatever reason, so we advocate for that, we’re trying to make improvements. A lot of needs particular to seniors, and we’ve tried to respond to those needs.
Miller: What differences do you see in resources available in Heppner – which is in the southern part of Morrow County, south of Boardman, well southwest of Pendleton – compared to what you would be likely to find in the Portland metro area?
Conklin: Oh absolutely, there’s a big difference. So for example, in a little town like Heppner – which should be repeated in a lot of other small Eastern Oregon towns or even in other parts of the west side – we don’t have those agencies like Oregon Department of Human Services, or here, CAPECO [Community Action Program of East Central Oregon], which is a state funded social agency … they’re not here local, they’re an hour away. And it’s not that easy to call, and harder for seniors to get on a computer and access the resources. So it’s definitely a change.
One thing we’ve done, and this is gonna happen next week. I’m really excited about it. The Department of Human Services in Hermiston and CAPECO out of Hermiston are gonna be coming here. They’re gonna try to do this once a month or once a quarter. And people can see them face to face and they’ll be able to access resources, talk to these … That’s one of the things that’s really different about a rural area, those resources are not readily available.
Miller: Stephanie, what are you asking lawmakers for this session in terms of aging?
Hooper: Well, we’re asking for leadership, a vision and a plan for how to address these changing demographics. There’ll be a House bill dropping, hopefully this week, that will create a task force called the Shared Future Oregon task force, that brings together state agencies, private entities, philanthropy and CBOs, to really build what’s called a multi-sector plan for aging, which is a best practice across the nation. But Oregon doesn’t have one yet.
Miller: When I think about lawmakers establishing a task, I think of it and I’ve heard about it as a kind of second choice. We wanted lawmakers to actually do something, to enact a policy or to put money towards something. Instead, they said, “let’s have a group of people come and talk about something.” What needs to be studied? Do you not already have a sense as an expert on this, of what the state should simply just enact?
Hooper: Well, AGE+ has been doing stakeholder engagement on what’s most important to older Oregonians over the last three or four years. So we really do have a sense of the issues and there really aren’t any surprises. What we also need, though, is to bring together experts and people with lived experience to develop the solutions that are right for Oregon. Identifying the issues aren’t as much as identifying the strategies and prioritizing those strategies. Because it can be overwhelming, so we have to take this in chunks. But right now, there’s no initiative to even have a plan.
Miller: As I am thinking about the graph you were talking about before, of relatively equal populations in terms of young Oregonians, middle-aged ones, older ones, it does make me wonder about generational tensions. Kids need better schools, older people need better support systems. Lawmakers have tough decisions to make in terms of funding priorities. How do you not pit generations against each other?
Hooper: It’s so important not to do that. And it’s really hard not to do that because our funding streams are so siloed. But what this planning effort can provide is an opportunity to step back and see, how can we align some of these resources?
Miller: What’s an example of that, where you de-silo … you can actually have public dollars helping a broad swath of ages of Oregonians?
Hooper: Well, a dream example is, look at the commercial kitchens that are in most schools. Why couldn’t kitchens also be producing meals on wheels, or meals for older adults to be delivered? As we see a childcare workforce crisis and an elder care workforce crisis, why aren’t we working in conjunction to see where those skills overlap, and have a concerted effort of caregiving, instead of it being designated by age?
Miller: And are you imagining, say, a senior care facility that doesn’t take the highest needs cases, and a daycare co-located?
Hooper: It has been done across the country. And that there are situations where that can be really beneficial. Imagine if a working parent had a place where they could drop off an older parent as well as a younger child, that can also stay together all day, but be cared for. And use the skills, the mentoring and the nurturing that that older adult has to help with the care.
Miller: Jerry, this gets us back to what Stephanie had said earlier that with older Oregonians, we’re not just talking about a gap in services for them, but a gap in taking advantage of what they have to offer. How do you think about that where you are?
Conklin: I appreciate Stephanie so much, and what she’s talked about there. I think one of our things that we’ve experienced here is that the needs are so great, and the number of folks we’re talking about, it really has taken the community to embrace seniors. What’s happened for us is we have over 100 volunteers who help in our senior meal program. They’re on a rotating basis, but nonetheless all those people have now better connected to the seniors. The seniors are better connected to them. Some of them are high schoolers. And when they’re here, that’s great. The energy they have, the seniors love it. I think part of the dynamic for us and our success has been finding ways to connect the community and caring for its seniors. And it’s not just the volunteers, it’s also the speakers.
I think also the seniors, in our exercise classes and stuff, once they have a venue where they could be connected together, they look out for each other, and that’s another way that helps.
Miller: Stephanie, how much do you think our society here shows that it respects or values older members of our society?
Hooper: Well, I think there are implicit and overt ways that that comes across. At the root of that is how it’s so ingrained in ourselves personally. We have seen images since we were young of the wicked old witch. It is ingrained in our system. We have to take a step back, recognize it and start to dismantle that implicit ageism, and the overt ageism that we see in terms of workplace discrimination, in terms of how COVID was handled. But I do feel like dismantling ageism is at the core of our culture shift.
Miller: How do we do that? That doesn’t seem like legislative work or policy work, that seems so much deeper and more personal, or more interpersonal. How do we do that?
Hooper: I think it starts with leadership. AGE+ has launched a program here in Oregon called the Leadership Exchange on Ageism. It’s a program that was developed in the state of Maine, and AGE+ is the first national scaling partner for this work. It really brings together leaders, people that are decision makers, policy makers, managers, influencers to come together in a trusted dialogue environment to really examine their own bias, their organization’s bias and systemic bias, and how that intersects with other types of bias like racism and sexism.
Through that dialogue, and sharing and building those trusted relationships, as well as the increased knowledge, those leaders who are in powerful positions, decision makers, can make different decisions to accelerate systems change.
Miller: Jerry, how has doing this work made you think about your own later years? Ideally, we will all be lucky enough to qualify as older Americans – that’s the dream. How has this made you think about those years to come?
Conklin: I’m actually the caregiver for my wife who has stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She’s been fighting that for eight years. And I’m a hospice chaplain. I regularly visit dying folks and their families. So in the realm of caring about seniors, it’s really kind of my life. Just from that perspective, the value of life, and caring for people.
I hate to take too much time, but I got to share a story on Stephanie’s behalf. I went to a conference two years ago, AGE+ was there. I heard from Stephanie, I heard from others from AGE+ in the Oregon Rural Health Conference. They talked about taking care of seniors. That was long before I started any of this. And that conference, and those leaders inspired me to do much of what we’ve done here. So I really appreciate you, Stephanie, I appreciate AGE+. And that manner of leadership and encouraging people to value seniors is a really big deal and it can make a difference.
Miller: Jerry Conklin and Stephanie Hooper, thanks very much.
Conklin: Thank you. Thank you, Jerry.
Hooper: Thanks, Stephanie.
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