Day-Care Program for Children, Elderly Gains 2-Year Lease

The Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission on Monday approved a two-year lease on an Encino park building that will house an intergenerational day-care center for children and the elderly.

The lease approval enables the nonprofit Organization for the Needs of the Elderly to begin raising funds from private as well as state and federal sources to renovate the building and implement the joint program. Recreation and parks authorities will extend the lease to 10 years if the group gets the money to pay for major building improvements.

When the intergenerational program begins--as is expected to happen within a year--it will be one of eight to 10 such centers in the country, the second on the West Coast and the first in Los Angeles, said Jackie Brainard, an aide to Councilwoman Joy Picus. The councilwoman is a key supporter of the day-care center.

The Organization for the Needs of the Elderly currently runs a day-care program in Reseda for elderly adults who need supervision because they suffer from diseases such as Alzheimer’s or are too frail to care for themselves.

That program will move to the facility at the White Oak Recreation Center on Victory Boulevard near White Oak Avenue in Encino some time after March 1, when the lease begins. Once building renovation is complete and operational funding is raised, the day-care program will expand to include children.

The additional space will enable the program to expand from the 10 people currently served to 35, allowing those who now care for them to work, attend school or relax.

“We’re talking about respite for 35 or more care givers,” many of whom need the program to be able to work, said Estelle Cooper, executive director of the Organization for the Needs of the Elderly.

Picus said she had been discussing the possibility of starting the program with Cooper for several years, but they could not find a building to house it. “Now it’s coming together as if it’s ordained, as if it were meant to be this way,” Picus said after the vote.

The Encino intergenerational day-care program will be modeled on a similar program run by the Stride Rite shoe company in Cambridge, Mass., for its employees. The children are not supervised by the elderly adults, nor are they together all day, Brainard said.

Rather the adults and children will be in separate programs, but will come together two or three times each day for meals or special organized activities, such as art projects and dancing, said Nancy Steiner, spokeswoman for the Organization for the Needs of the Elderly.

Devising such activities should not be much of a problem, she said.

“As the motor skills of an elderly person decrease, the motor skills of a child increase, so that at some point, you can get comparable motor skills in both groups. So it is possible to have an arts and crafts project that both groups can do and benefit from,” she said.

The center will operate Monday to Friday, from 6:30 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. in order to accommodate family members who work during the day, Steiner said. The day care will be moderately priced for both groups to make it accessible to middle- and low-income families, Steiner said.

The cost for the elderly day-care center will be between $25 and $35 per day, but there will be 10 free spots for low-income families who qualify, Cooper said. In addition, she hopes the fund-raising will provide money to make grants available to others.