Golden Living

The best ideas for Golden Living columns often come from our readers. In this case, it was a friend of the Office for the Aging (OFA) who read a recent Golden Living column on preventing home improvement scams targeting older adults looking to remodel their homes with an eye toward aging-in-place, who asked:

For many years, the Office for the Aging (OFA) has provided older adults and caregivers with resources to protect themselves from scams and elder abuse. The extent of elder abuse is difficult to measure. About 260,000 older adults are victimized in New York State each year, but many more cases go unreported or undetected.

Caregiver Conference

The Dutchess County Office for the Aging (OFA) fields questions not only from seniors themselves, but from caregivers of all ages who may find the demands of caregiving more of a handful than they may have anticipated.

By our count, we have a record number of Dutchess County older adults celebrating birthdays of 100 years or more this year, as well as a record number of married couples celebrating wedding anniversaries of 70 years or more.

New York’s 2021-22 Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) is open until Friday, April 29, or until funds are exhausted. Qualifying older adults who haven’t applied over the previous winter (2021-22) are encouraged to apply; the Office for the Aging (OFA) can help.

The Office for the Aging’s (OFA) popular “A Matter of Balance” program is getting ready for a series of in-person classes, which returned in Poughkeepsie on March 7.

Two additional sessions of “A Matter of Balance” began again in mid-March; one in Fishkill, another in Rhinebeck.

Do you know a Dutchess County resident who will turn 100 or older this year, or a Dutchess County couple celebrating 70 or more years of marriage? We’d like to honor them, with their permission, in the special “Celebration of Aging” section of the Summer 2022 Office of the Aging (OFA) newsletter that’s distributed throughout the county.

February is both Black History Month and American Heart Month, and an opportune time to address conditions like diabetes that are common among older adults, and disproportionately affecting older African Americans among the general older-adult population — 52 hospitalizations per 10,000 African American New Yorkers, compared to 17.7 per 10,000 f