You can listen to Episode S2E9 right here!
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Hello, and welcome to the Third Age design podcast, sharing essential information on senior environments. I’m Lori Pinkerton Rolet. Last month our special guest was Colin Milner from Victoria, Canada, and we’re staying with the Canucks this month when I speak to Jonas Younkin, an expert in cohousing. So if you’re operating a retirement village or a care home, you might be mistaken for thinking this episode does not apply to you. But discussions on cohousing are taking place everywhere at the moment. And this may very soon represent a serious competition for you in the market, or might even be something you’d like to look at in further detail for your own offers. What is the model? And what is required by way of facilities? Is this truly a new lifestyle in senior living? And we’re going to go to the United States in follow up to information given to us a couple months back from our guest, Melinda Avila Torrio, who introduced us to the well zester group. And I’m going to be speaking with Kyle Robinson, partner and co founder of wells esta about their unique contributions to senior living in this month’s innovation spotlight. Writer Isaac Asimov is quoted as saying, your assumptions are your windows on the world, scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. I’m going to pause just for a second because that is really worth some real thought. What are our assumptions about Senior Living the financial aspects, the physical aspects, emotional? What about the intellectual aspects? Well, if you’re ready to let some light in, that’s why Third Age design is here to learn from international experts and challenge the status quo in short, to improve senior environments by sharing essential information, just go to www Third Age Dot Design and tap on the Join Us button. And when you do you’ll automatically receive a quarterly a TAD extra, which is exclusive information for our community members. And there’s no cost to join. The third age design podcast is supported by a nova care concepts whose mission is to enhance quality of life through innovation. From hydrotherapy pools to furniture, you’ll find quality, aesthetics and functionality in all unique Innova products; Innova Care concepts: the leading edge of health care. Okay, let’s get started. So my guest today is Jonas Jongkind, or Jonas, John King. But would you pronounce it correctly for us, please?
Yonas Jongkind
The first one Jonas Jongkind.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Thank you very much. And can you give me a little bit of a background in terms of how you got engaged with the cohousing movement to begin with?
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah, well, I didn’t know about cohousing. But my brother was at a personal wellness course. And afterwards a bunch of the alumni went there for a fundraiser for this Saskatchewan farmer who was battling Monsanto and needed legal costs. They had a music concert there. So I went there. And right away when I came into the building, it just felt different because they really have a lot of community there. So for me, it just started with that that feeling of reconnecting with the idea or the feeling of community.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Right and is that at the I’m probably going to mispronounce this as well, but
Yonas Jongkind
when song when song cohousing that’s what
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
I can pronounce but the other one is Nanaimo? Nanaimo, Nanaimo. Okay. And that is a specific development in Canada, isn’t it?
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah, so when song was the first cohousing I lived in and it was in Langley. Okay. When song was a lot of fun, there’s a lot of kids there. It’s slightly larger than the one in IMO. And we have a lot of parties and a lot of just a lot of good little conversations on the community street. When I moved in, I had young children, I connected with some other parents, my wife and I were going through a little bit of postpartum depression, which puts a pressure cooker on one’s life, so we had to sort out that as well.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And when you say the community street, I know this is sort of part of the overall setup from what I’ve the research I’ve done, but can you describe the basic setup of a cohousing community?
Yonas Jongkind
So collapsing communities? Legally they’re just regular condos or apartments, but the building design is different that is the thing that makes cohousing magic. So like a lot of coops and communes and everything else like that, and the 70s and 80s. And cohousing seems to be the thing that’s really succeeding. And the reason for that is legally, it’s all the usual financing and stuff. But socially, the architecture is really working to help. I kind of think of it, it’s like when you have a guitar and you leave the guitar out, you can pick it up anytime you want and play just because you’re seeing it all the time, you’re reminded of it. So in a co housing community, every time you come out of your home, you kind of come on to this pedestrian community street that you use to visit your neighbours or go to your car and go somewhere else. But lots of times on the community street, there might be kids playing or other neighbours there that you can just bump into and chat with. And that I think, is really what creates that communities, these little check ins with people, how are they doing? And from there, other things can grow.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
It sounds like the sort of community that I grew up in as a child in northwestern United States where we used to play in the street, not very many cars would come down and everybody knew everybody else and knew the neighbours. Is this a different way of achieving, achieving that sort of community spirit.
Yonas Jongkind
I think a lot of people have like childhood memories of the world being more like it isn’t cohousing and ultimately, I don’t think that causes really creating that much new. It’s just a way of recreating what people already had. And the one other thing that we have in cohousing that I didn’t mention, in addition to the community Street is when we’re the future residents design the project and they spend some time thinking about like, what else can we share and benefit from so they’ll typically create like a wood shop, dining area guest room and a lounge, unlike the woodshop is just so you can maintain the project for the handy guys. And the guest room is I live I’ve lived in three closings and I’m in a third one now and I still have friends from the other cohousing so they’ll call me up I’m on the island it’s an attractive place to spend a week get to look call me up and say how can we come over for the weekend I got a friend coming in two days Joyce and she’s doing this so she’s this is the guest room available on such and such a night and and I can just book her into a plane we charge $10 And $15 a night. It’s a very small fee. And then she comes she can use the common house for dining eating we get together we play Magic wrong and do our thing. And then she also can explore around and Nymo into her things. So it’s a real great way to host guests that I might not quite host in my home. But it’s really fun that she can come visit and we’d have some time her and a partner.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So you said there’s so there’s a community street and you said From there you can go to your car. So does that mean that community Street is pedestrianised?
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah, the community Street is this pedestrianised. That really is why you can connect with your neighbours. Like in Canada right now. We have a lot of townhome developments and you’re like walk out the door of your townhome and they’re like, all you see is karar cargo or you know the garage doors. And that’s it because everyone just like drives out and goes on your way. So there really is no way to know your neighbours and a lot of time when I talk to people who are interested in cohousing. They might only know like one or two or three of their immediate neighbours and cohousing is sized based on how many people people typically can No it’s like anthropologists or something figured out that we have so many people. So for that reason, cohousing communities are like 60 to 100 people, which is usually works out to be around 30 ish homes, so that way everyone in a cohousing if you asked anyone in my cohousing no all know everyone else in the cohousing.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So you said you have a community house as well. And when you you mentioned a restaurant, what else is in that sort of main facility or am I not understanding this correctly?
Yonas Jongkind
So in each cohousing, we have what we call the common house and the common house will have like a kitchen just a little bit larger than your average kitchen. They’ll have a dining room where we can do community dinners and closings, we try and do like four or five community dinners a week. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, if you do one community dinner, everyone’s going to show up and then you’ll have like, a glare, bloody nightmare. But we do on five nights a week, then maybe 15 or 20 people will show up and that’s just a decent size dinner party. So logistically, it’s better to run more smaller events, less noise easier to clean up on. So so we use the kitchen and dining room for the community events and then afterwards, you know, people are cleaning up. So some of the adults will tend to slide over to the lounge where there’s, you know, usually comfy couches and things like that, to carry on their conversation, just a few people. And then some of the kids might head outside or they may drift over to the playroom, which is usually like a rumpus room for big activities. And then and this can be a multipurpose room a shop a music room, a craft room Whatever that community decides that they want to have in their common spaces,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
so they collectively, the group gets together and says, what do we want in this community? What is it going to cost? How do we build it? What are we putting in? Is that is that the background of it? And one of the biggest failures that we’re finding kind of around the world in terms of senior living is loneliness, and the depression that comes with that. And a lot of older people move to care homes or retirement communities or things where they’re surrounded more by people their own age, with sort of care built in. How do seniors tend to fare in cohousing communities in your experience?
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah, so. So I’ve read some research, someone was studying this, and they figured that that cohousing could add sort of 10 productive years to your life. So I think especially for men, when men sometimes retire, they’ve been stimulated at work, they’ve got a social network at work. And as you retire, all that stuff starts to fade away. And some people did some studies, and they showed that your social health, which they define in a complicated way, but basically, it has to do with how many people would you be comfortable asking for money or something like that, that has as much impact on your health as smoking, drinking, exercise and diet. And I think for a lot of people that are not getting those social health needs met, maybe at a critical time in their life, too. Because a lot of that can automatically be taken care of by work. And right. And I’ve known a few men, especially who retire and then they just end up, you know, just pushing the lawnmower around. I mean, it’s not a good social environment. And that can be a lot of TV involved in that. And I saw some studies online that show that, like when that happens, the IQ of men after they retire can plummet quite a bit in those first few years.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
How interesting did not know did not hear about that? That’s very interesting. I’ll make sure to make sure links. Yeah,
Yonas Jongkind
make sure you fact check me but that’s what I remember reading. I remember being surprised by that someone could measure it and how significant it was, I will
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
we will look into that. And if we were finding some links on that, we’ll put that related to this podcast episode. So people can can look into that further, or the people that are elderly, within any of these communities? Are they sort of treated the same as as everybody else? Are they treated like elders of a, you know, tribe would be treated? How are they? Is there any difference in the relationship and how they interact with the rest of the community, as opposed to people of other ages?
Yonas Jongkind
Um, yeah, that’s absolutely, people in different age groups are treated differently and interact differently. So the kids are treated like kids, people are sort of working age, they spend a lot of time at work. And they tend to be like, sort of doing a lot more, if you will, in their lives and around the community. And the elders tend to be, they have more time to enjoy community, they tend to contribute a lot to the community in terms of like gardening, landscaping committee work, they tend to contribute a lot to the community in terms of experience and wisdom, like here in Pacific gardens, one of my neighbours, Frances, she saw me going through some stuff with one of my teenagers, and she just had some resources that she shared with me, because it’s kind of like, in a way, an extended family. So in these ways, these ways elders in their community are contributing and participating in different ways. And there’s also like, I think, a little bit of tensions too, because sometimes the elders want different, slightly different things. And they’re very aware of it. They know what all the young whippersnappers are up to, and how they got their ideas about how things should be done. And what you should keep a few things like a little bit taboo as well. Like, for example, we sort of have a semi unspoken rule that we try not to give anyone else parenting advice, for example,
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
right. So you’ve got these sort of community spaces. Is there any real real separate separation between community and the private and the reason I’m mentioning this is going back to my own childhood when we we all knew the neighbours you know, in the way that we were speaking about before we also used to leave our doors open now I’m not I’m not spreading this worldwide, so people We’ll start walking in your houses. But we use, you know, if you needed something and the neighbour wasn’t home, you would go in and get it. And then you would tell them that you’d borrowed that. I mean, it was just kind of nobody locked the door unless you were going away. Is it? Is it that open? Or is it private housing and shared and shared spaces?
Yonas Jongkind
Well, the private housing is definitely private housing, you know, ways that housing is private. And there’s definitely four neighbours that I would feel perfectly comfortable walking into their house when they weren’t home and getting the eggs that I’m missing. Right. Okay, and then sending them a text afterwards, raise your fridge took some eggs.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Right. Okay. So it’s a true a true community. I mean, when you’ve been involved in the building of these communities, what have you learned about the master planning of the site on in terms of the overall footprint that you might need for a community of that size or specific needs of specific buildings, ie if someone was thinking, this is something I’d like to look into more? Where do I start? What sort of decisions need to be made from a construction building standpoint quite early on?
Yonas Jongkind
Well, that’s a really big question.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That’s why I’m here.
Yonas Jongkind
If someone was starting out and they wanted to cohousing Yeah, I think the first thing to do is to get together in the hardest part for all the CO housings. I’m working with some other another cohousing group here in Nanaimo to organise one. The hardest part for cause and group system is to find those burning souls who are willing to purchase the land to create a cohousing because the first thing you need to do is buy a piece of land that will probably be something like two acres if it’s more rural or one acre, if it’s more urban, where you’re going to build the houses and that can take quite a bit of money and faith to do. So in Nanaimo, I’m helping a creating a cohousing because I just purchased the land, and then networked around to find the burning souls to be in the project because I think it’s such a great way of lifestyle. It’s hard for the projects to get started. Right. And once you have the site, then you got to work with an architect who knows about cohousing to come up with the design. Obviously, an architect will know all about fire codes and how to build community streets and all that stuff. And then even later on, then you hire a builder to build with the architect design. For the most part, after you’re done with the architect, it’s basically just perfectly normal construction. If that makes any sense. Like the bathrooms will likely be convertible or whatever the partially accessible version.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Yes, yes, I understand what
Yonas Jongkind
all all this stuff is pretty normal in construction. Nowadays, though.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
You make collective decisions about for example, this communal space needs to be refurbished or upgraded or something that would be something that the whole community would discuss and become a sort of financial project.
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah. So in a regular strata they spent a lot of time on. on managing the strata, most closings my experience is that we’ve got like one little committee could be called accounting and legal or something that does all of the regular administration stuff. And the community tends to be focused on how can we make our building more beautiful. What are we doing with the gardens? What are we doing about social events, maybe talking about causes related to social responsibility? Meeting the needs of residents like what’s happening with people’s anyone needing support, so that tends to dominate the agenda that would otherwise be dominated by, you know, accounting and legal type stuff. Right? Oh, cool. I just spent a lot of time thinking about how to beautify the spaces. And oftentimes, it can be a community project to paint a room. Right mentioning, I was mentioning a lot of the elders help a lot with projects. So right now there’s some elders painting the music room here at Pacific gardens, and some other rooms I’ve been working on it for a few months, one by one.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
room by room, not one person by one person,
Yonas Jongkind
room by room. I think it’s all community or I think there’s like five people in on the project in total and just bite off little bits. One takes the light switches off and another one paints around. Right. That’s the cutting I think they call it and then someone else rolls and then someone else cleans up and then comes along and puts the furniture back. So it’s a team effort for sure.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
But you have you have even especially if you’re an older person, your commute you’re you’re with the community and you’re you’re participating for anybody that doesn’t know the phrase strata, as it refers to cohousing, can you just explain that because I’d read that term and I hadn’t seen it before.
Yonas Jongkind
Oh, yeah. That’s in Canada and Ontario. They call them condominium associations in BC. They call them strata associations and the US they call them homeowner associations, right? It’s all the same. It’s just a way of owning multifamily property.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And when you’re working with the architects and you don’t know, whose people are obviously engaged at the beginning in the building of it, they may be engaged in the building of their own private residence. In terms of community spaces, how much our disabilities are the needs of the elderly taken into account in the design of those facilities.
Yonas Jongkind
Well, there’s two flavours of cohousing. So one is called senior cohousing and one is multi generational cohousing and in Canada multigenerational is quite a bit more popular in Europe, especially in Denmark senior cohousing is doing very well as well. And I think it’s an attitude thing because the thing about seniors cohousing, you’ve got to be like a hyper responsible kind of person who’s planning ahead proactively. So when seniors cohousing they’ll often plan in like a suite in the common house. It’s fully accessible so that people can use that suite if they need it. Or often what they’ll do in the seniors cohousing is they’ll rent that suite out to someone in exchange for just a few services. So they could get like a student nurse or someone rent that space out to them, and then get just a little bit of help because there’s a lot of people who just need a tiny bit of help to be able to live a normal life. And the belief in senior cohousing is that the people in that community can support each other a little bit and they can carpool a little bit on getting some of the help so that it’s cost effective. And this way, they can sort of live in the cohousing rather than moving into you know, independent living is what we call it in Canada, which is basically not independent living. So that’s a way that it’s done in the multi generational cohousing. I mean, you know, the spaces are all accessible to people with various mobility issues, but I’d say there’s less of an emphasis on that. So there is like a tiny bit of an unspoken culture that we sort of help help help the elders out a little bit when we’re younger, with like moving heavy things or whatever it is, with the understanding that some future generation is going to pay it forward.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
absolutely does. It’ll, it’ll come back. Come back. In your opinion, what is the singular best advantage about cohousing for senior people?
Yonas Jongkind
In my opinion, the singular best advantage for cohousing for senior people is to just have a community of people that’s supporting you to solve the same to be connected with and solve the problems of life together. And I think that if you have to, like go out and visit someone or call them on the phone, it’s just a lot more complicated. But if you’re just in regular communication with someone, a little things that are happening, you can get support around. And I think also seniors contribute a lot to the CO housing here. They run a fence, they run the birthday things, they do birthday cards, they keep up with who needs little bits of support. And I think it really enriches everyone’s life, that they’re sort of watching over the community in a way that they are.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So it’s truly integrated all the way around regardless of age.
Yonas Jongkind
Absolutely.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
It sounds fantastic. It really does. Very intriguing. I very much appreciate your, your input on this topic.
Yonas Jongkind
Yeah, I personally couldn’t imagine living another way than cohousing. I’ve lived in the single family houses and the apartments and, and it’s fine. And a lot of people feel like it gives them all the privacy they need. And they’re concerned about being too close to the neighbours in the strata. And I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most people, there actually is a lot of benefit just to being connected with a tribe of people. I think humans sort of evolved in this tribal village way, whatever you want to call it. And I think it’s just there in the human brain and if there isn’t enough people around filling out your tribe. I think the brain is just like where it should be more people in my tribe, you know, even if you don’t know it, but the brain is looking for people in the tribe and cohousing for me just fills that gap that I didn’t. didn’t know was there. So always feel very hard to me that I didn’t know was unsatisfied. It’s very satisfied when I’m in cohousing.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That’s lovely. Thank you so much. As I mentioned earlier, Wellzesta came up in our original discussion with Melinda Avila Torio from THW design in Atlanta, Georgia. And today I’m joined by Wellzesta partner and co founder, Kyle Robinson. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Kyle Robinson
Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for all that you’re doing in this space and glad to be part of it today.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
But thank you. So you’ve been in the senior living sector for quite some time now, before founding wells esta what made you decide to go in this particular direction. And what spurred the growth of this particular company.
Kyle Robinson
I’ve always had a propensity towards being around senior adults, I grew up in this industry, my dad owned a consulting firm for 40 years in this space. And so I was around this industry my entire life, and ended up going to school and graduate school in gerontology and health communication. So I was sort of, I guess, called to do it, if you will, and loved working with communities across the country working with senior adults, the residents, the members, and of course, the staff as well. But really, after spending many years in this space, I left for a few years and went to work for a big four accounting firm, which was great, I learned a lot. But I wanted to spread my wings a little bit more and kept seeing that there was an opportunity that we wasn’t being met in the industry and said, If I can come back and bring something to the table, that’s what we want to do. In the meantime, I happened to meet a brilliant young man, who is now our CEO, Dr. John Robinson. And he does happen to be my husband never thought that would happen. But we work really well together and really brought our two minds together. He is a physician scientist by training. So really an MD PhD came at the problem, opportunity through health care. And I was seeing it through the lens of senior living. Yet we both knew technology and knew that we could build a team of developers to create something that was really meaningful. So we really saw an opportunity started doing some research with communities that we knew across the country, and started asking the right questions, and it definitely bubbled up that there was a way to really do better. Rather than being so capricious about doing something new. We needed to help these organisations be more proactive and more progressive as it related to health, wellbeing, communication, and what we call engagement.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So you started asking questions before you started coming up necessarily with with the answers, it sounds like but also you’ve come up with this theory, I saw a short video of you talking about the four H’s. I think that was a club in the United States when I was if I’m not mistaken. What do you mean by four H’s? Yeah, I
Kyle Robinson
think there is a club and it relates to something in agriculture, yes. But the four h is why else, when people who did not know anything about the, quote, Senior Living industry, I would best describe it as well. It’s the best of four H’s, it offers health care which people want and need. It offers housing. So there’s a whole real estate component to it. It offers a lot of hospitality, so services and amenities and things like that. And then really the fourth age that wasn’t really rising to the top, but to me, it’s so important to the work that’s been done was holistic wellness, and to be able to see, okay, we’re going to try things before they happen. So what we actually ended up doing was creating an electronic wellness record system that kind of complements what you would find in an electronic health record system. But those four H’s really arm every time you go on a campus, you can feel those and some of them showcase one H more prep more prevalently than other and some are evenly spread and some have one that really shines, if you will.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
It’s interesting because I’ve never actually heard the word hospitality in connection with the sector. And obviously, once you say it, it’s very obvious, but it’s not an immediate Association, certainly that I have had before. So that in and of itself is quite a lot to, to think about and I know you’re your business partner and husband is a scientist and you have this sort of scientific Background which is gives you a lot of depth in what it is you’re putting forward that we really don’t see with other providers or that I haven’t that are offering sort of software packages. So, for example, you I downloaded one of your white papers, I think that was the first time you and I had been in contact with each other. And it was called addressing depression, the silent killer among seniors. It was written by two doctors, and it looks as if you do a lot of continuous research, is that is that correct? It’s not you’re not getting answers and then producing the research, it looks like you’re generating it. Is that correct? Well,
Kyle Robinson
yes, our clients are generating it. And then we are pulling that information. One of our goals going into this was to be a influencer, thought leader in this industry, not based on what we were really doing. But what we were seeing what we were hearing and what we were collecting. So for example, we knew that you could get to better outcomes if you were collecting the right information. We also did not want the staff to guess what it was because they’re out there working. Every single day, we wanted to hear directly from the residents and the members. And so part of what the software does is it allows for that it allows for very strong bi directional communication. So that way, I’ll give you an example. So let’s just say I live in a community and I attend a Tai Chi class that day. Typically, in this industry, they would do a survey, and it would be a year long survey, they would do it one time, you know, and they might ask questions, but I personally can’t remember necessarily what all I did last month and why it was important. But if you ask somebody right after they have either taken part in something like Tai Chi, we ask the question, Did you attend? Yes, No. Was it one to five stars? What did you think about the event? And then we always ask the question, on a scale of one to five, how did it benefit your health and well being. And the reason why that’s so important is because the individual is telling the community what’s working for them instead of us get in generally, when people move into communities, historically, it was kind of blanket ever, you know, it was all the same programming and services no matter what age or whatever you liked, and then you just went to what you preferred. In this case, we’re trying to help provide enough data and analytics that helps with personalization. Because in today’s world, you know, what works for one person may not work for another. And oftentimes people at the community level are serving maybe two, maybe three generations, that are very different in their thinking and what their needs are. And having that data on hand is very helpful. And it’s really coming very easily from the individual. So you’re not having to go out and really search for it is just kind of coming through and how they’re answering questions or what they’re gravitating to within the platform.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
And it also must make them feel a personal sense of responsibility and engagement with the community, one would imagine, and that, that their opinion matters. If you’re only asking them once a year, they’re up, they’re not showing up, it feels as if it it may not, you know, particularly matter. But we’re going through this exercise of asking you every now and then, whereas I’m participating in what I want within my environment is a very engaging response.
Kyle Robinson
It you must ask it, you know, they these, this is their home, people move there usually number one for lifestyle, and then they have all these other things as part if they don’t move too late quote. And so being able to have them live their lives in just a different you’re just in a different community, a different environment, but still really say this, these are my needs. These are my wants, here’s how I want to participate. And what you find is that when people’s voices are heard, they are much more likely to number one buy into whatever is happening at the work community. Number two, they want to participate more. And number three, their level of daily and weekly engagement increases. And we do measure things like this, mostly to help the staff to be able to see where they where they are. And so we’ll measure things like daily engagement and to my knowledge with a platform like ours, we have the highest daily engagement in the country. We have an average age of 84 years old that uses this platform, and a daily engagement rate of 78% Wow. Yeah, most people do say wow to that because it’s it’s really strong if you’re using paper. Of course you can’t measure it very Well, if you’re using a portal of any kind, it’s usually 25 to maybe 40%. Other platforms, you know, may have may go up a little bit, but we work really hard to increase engagement. And we have many different ways that we do that.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Kyle, it seems like you are ready have a programme for staff also, how does that work? And what are the benefits of that?
Kyle Robinson
Yeah, great question. So we actually started this, the, the platform we’ve been speaking of, is called Wellness to life. And the, during COVID, what we saw was, you know, staff need even more support than ever before, because they’re overworked and stressed and, and all these kinds of things that are in a difficult, you know, a difficult time. And so part of our goal, we also work in the homecare space, so work with people who go into people’s homes, and our we have a platform for the caregivers there. And what we were seeing was they were leveraging the platform to stay connected to one another to be almost like a support group. We also provide health and wellness content for them that they could maybe read about a healthy recipe, when they get off work, maybe they could do an exercise with one of their people they’re giving care to that day, they see there’s humour on there, they get their messages directly from their team. So what we did was basically we took that same code base and made it applicable for the staff at Senior Living organisations, and that’s called was asked to elevate, because we we know how hard it is right now to, first of all, to attract and keep innovative and good and great staff and teams. Yeah, part of what we wanted to offer was a personalised workforce engagement platform that also encompassed wellness as a piece of it, that almost that was almost the drive to get them in there. Or some people are driven by just getting the messages that they need every day in a way that you and I are used to, on our phones, typically. So most of them do use it on their phones, and also that they could have communication among whatever group they work in. So the dining staff can communicate the, the nursing staff can communicate, HR staff can communicate. And then if you have a large organisation, you know, the same kind of branding can go down from maybe corporate, that if they’re trying out a new programme or something and everybody’s hearing that same consistent messaging daily, or however often they’re opening the platform. But it allows them to feel like, hey, this was built for me.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
So it’s an it’s an engagement. Are you? Are you looking to branch out internationally? Are you staying within the states? How would anybody that’s listening to the podcast? What’s the best way for them to get a hold of you and look into this further? Sure,
Kyle Robinson
absolutely. Well, we already have, we have an international team that works with us. So we’re already sort of geared that way, we have international people on our team and Brazil, Costa Rica, Ireland, and of course, across the United States as well. So we’re how already have that propensity. Our CEO has deep roots grew up in Japan has a culture and people influencers there, as well as different places in Europe, like France. So we already have kind of thought this through, and would like to go in that direction. I think timing like everything in life, timing is key. And so to do it at the right time, but you know, there’s so much that you can do virtually today that I think you can, you can make it work really almost anywhere in the country, we certainly have made virtual work. I will put one caveat, caveat on that, in that in order to have really, really strong experiences, what we call our client with our client partners, which are the communities themselves and the staff that work there. Seeing them from time to time definitely is is a benefit. We also do on site training. That’s been a big differentiator for us for kind of stickiness of the product getting it off the ground in the right way. And so you know, that would just mean a little longer travel but we’re happy for that we have you know, frequent flyer miles and you know, bags will will pack and go
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Thank you Kyle, we’re gonna put a link to the website on the podcast page for this episode. And any listeners can follow up directly with with wills esta
Kyle Robinson
Okay, great. Yeah, the probably the best way to get in touch is to go to the website. Well, Wellzesta.com
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Kyle Robinson
My pleasure. I appreciate the time and thanks for all that you’re doing in the space as well.
Lori Pinkerton-Rolet
That was a very full episode. So just time for a quick look at our TAD international events calendar. The Care Show 2022 is at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England, from the 12th to the 13th of October. And if you’re going, please do drop by the unique VR hub for care developed specifically for the show by Third Age design. Then I see a conference Leadership Summit and Expo is in Orlando, Florida, USA, from the eighth to the 10th of November, and the future of ageing 2022 conference will take place at the Wellcome collection in London, England on November the 24th. I’m going to all three of those events myself, so hope to see you there. You’ll find more international shows and conferences on the events page at ThirdAgeDot.Design, and let us know via the contact page if you’d like an event listed thank you to our special guest Jonas Jongkind. To Kyle Robinson of Wellzesta, to our producer Mike Scales, to Valerie Adler of the Right Website, to Peter Thorne, who composed our theme music and is playing the piano with Mary Blanchard on flute and to our sponsor, Innova Care Concepts, the leading edge of health care. And finally to you. Thank you so much for being part of a community who believes we can improve senior environments together. I’m Lori Pinkerton Rolet and I hope you’ll join me for the next one.