A Dream Realized

Home In Place holds its first annual meeting.

June 8, 2022

Last Thursday, on June 2nd, Home In Place held its first ever annual meeting, announcing new members of the board and providing a comprehensive breakdown of its financial expenditures, while also celebrating a benchmark achievement for the organization. Started by a small community of motivated individuals around five years ago, with its active implementation somewhat forestalled by the pandemic, Home In Place seeks to help the elderly of the wider Tuscaloosa community do just that, live their lives to the fullest in their own homes. 

Board President Carolyn Dahl says that the organization began with the awareness that family structures have drastically changed over the decades. Whereas the elderly were once kept as part of the nuclear family, they now are more independent and less likely to live with or near their kin, with the added complication that humans are on average living longer necessitating more services to keep individuals determined to maintain autonomy moving about as they both need and please. 

Says Dahl, “Home In Place is meant to be a community for aging in place, part of a national trend that emphasizes aging in community and values keeping people connected to our communities, living where they want to live, living at home. One of the things I value so much about it is it’s meant to be grassroots and community based, a bubble-up idea that we create a network that supports one another. It’s not meant to be top-down, handed to us, it's meant to be what we create it to be.”

In their first open year, they provided 372 volunteer services, including trips to wellness checks, rides to the store, community outings, technical help both in person and over the phone, just to name a few. As they addressed at their meeting, Home In Place is open to any ideas and needs that their villagers should request, even such simple tasks as fixing a squeaky cabinet or helping to pack-up and take donations to the thrift store. 

Rita Telle was there at the meeting to find out more about the organization. She’s a caregiver who is interested in learning about…

Executive Director Becky Embrey talks to guests before the first annual meeting for Home In Place.

Carolyn Dahl is the Board President for Home In Place.

Gary Creek, new Board member, and Susan Campbell, there representing First Presbyterian, at the first annual Home In Place meeting

Becky Embrey (left) and Gary Creek (right) listen as Lynn Brooks (center) gives her testimony about the importance of having an organization like Home In Place in the Tuscaloosa area community.

…their services and if they plan to expand. Home In Place currently only serves Tuscaloosa County, but can also be the blueprint for other communities wishing to expand on their success.  They work in tandem with the Village to Village national network, which is an information sharing support group to those that wish to start a “village” in their community. 

New board member Gary Creek, who also designed the logo for the organization, says that it was the organization’s mission that inspired him to serve. “I want to be able to see folks stay in their homes as absolutely as long as possible and enjoy their life as long as possible. To be happy and healthy as you age, to stay in your home around your physical belongings and all your memories, it has positive mental and physical results, and I just want to help. To do what I can do.”

Home In Place is a non-profit, and accepts donations year round, though they prefer to focus their full energies on providing their services to their villagers.  Both volunteers and villagers are vetted by Becky Embrey, the Director of Home In Place, who says that it is the best part of her job getting to connect to people. “The volunteers and villagers are the basis, the rock, of everything we do at Home In Place. I have the pleasure of interviewing all of the villagers and interviewing all of the volunteers and getting to know them. I learn about their families, I learn about them, about what they like, about what they don’t like, I know all of their stories.” Embrey herself began her work with the organization in her own seventh decade, and so she states that she exemplifies their goal in her own life, “One thing about this job is that something good happens every day. It’s the best way to live your life and to make the most of your senior life.”

The Keynote speaker for the event was Tuscaloosa’s own Lynn Brooks, whose husband, Joel Dorroh, also serves on the board for Home In Place. She spoke with emotional fervor of her own experiences as a caregiver after her mother, Brenda Brooks, suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in February of 2020. She says the mission of Home In Place hits her heart hard, as she states that a question her mother asks her daily is, “Multiple times a day, seven days a week, without fail, ‘When are you taking me home?’”

Home In Place looks forward to their growth in the future, expanding their services to as many as have needs, including looking at scholarship options for lower income villagers and also expanding their volunteer network to encompass more specialty needs as well as making it possible to navigate their villagers more thoroughly through all the opportunities that the Tuscaloosa area has to offer. The organization has worked in partnership with many already long-standing organizations to build their mission, and looks to further this cooperative network in their future, as well.

Says Dahl, “This village idea challenges us to make the most of the ways older adults can remain in and connected to our communities. We all want to have options, and we don’t want to have to make a trade-off of living safely and living independently. Our mission is to change how aging is viewed in our community, that aging is a time of opportunity rather than a time of crisis.” 

For more information or to donate, become a villager, or become a volunteer, visit home-in-place.org