A $45,000 grant from the Women’s Foundation of Collier County will help some low-income senior women age in place safely and happily.
A previous grant from the Women’s Foundation helped to house 42 low-income senior women who were referred to the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Collier County.
"We were able to help those seniors not only do the paperwork to qualify, but help them
with also some first last and deposits and the move-in and making sure that they were settled," said NAMI Collier CEO Beth Hatch.
Now those women and others will have a staff member meeting them where they live at an apartment complex in Naples.
"The really neat thing that we kind of do with all of our programs is that we stay with those women because we want to make sure that we're just not doing a Band-Aid, that this new living environment is sustainable," said Hatch. "So we visit them frequently and just, because as a woman, a senior gets older, they're going to need prevention and outreach.
"Maybe if they did drive and then they have to stop driving or they become widowed.
So many different circumstances and so many don't have someone here or family here.
So that's where we kind of come in."
These seniors may not have had contact with mental health services before.
"Some may not even have a diagnosis, but they're truly facing isolation and depression, which can happen so easily as we get older," Hatch said. "So we're bringing the programming to them and really meeting their needs.
"And then we get to go further into their own apartments and really look to make sure that all their basic needs are being met. And if they're not, then if we don't have the resources at NAMI, then we're going to connect them to another partner organization that does."
The Women's Foundation of Collier County was established in 1996 as a field-of-interest fund administered by the Collier Community Foundation. Its mission is to be a catalyst for change in the lives of women and girls in Collier County. It has granted $2.4 million to local women's and girls' programs and organizations.
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