Dear Friend,
The results of our Giving Tuesday campaign are in, and I’m pleased to report that we received $4000 in donations. Our end-of-the-year goal is $8000.
Two years ago, in the absence of a “brick and mortar” senior citizens center here in Montclair, several of us older residents started a virtual, on- line center, the Montclair Gateway to Aging in Place. As the name implies, our over-arching goal is to affect civic policies and to provide our older residents with the resources and support they need to remain in their hometown and not be “priced out” as they increase in age and decrease in income.
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic underscored the necessity for such an institution. We were able to reach out to our constituents and help more than one hundred of them get the inoculations they needed.
In 2020, in the course of providing the Gateway Campaign to Vaccination, we learned that many our contemporaries lack competency in using digital tools – the absolute predicate of an on-line community and the essential infrastructure to such services as Telehealth, e-government, social interaction, shopping, assisted transportation, and on and on. You get the idea. We have also launched a Campaign for Housing Equity.
So we have undertaken a concerted campaign to remedy this deficiency: the Campaign for Digital Equity. We have formed relationships with other organizations concerned with this issue, such as the Montclair Public Library, Lifelong Montclair, Montclair Women’s Club, and the Do Drop In, to address it. At the same time that we are tackling the problem of digital inequity, we are joining efforts to increase the availability of financially sustainable housing for our senior citizens, because how can you “age in place” if you don’t have a place? Our efforts to create a new, more permissive town statute allowing homeowners to add Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) on their properties is nearing final Town Council adoption.
And we still insist that Montclair should not stand alone in lacking a physical senior citizens center. We demand budgetary equity to meet the needs of our constituency. Here is a recent article on our Campaign to Make Montclair Age Friendlier.
Please take another minute to visit the rest of our website, montclairgateway.org, to learn more about our overall program, community outreach, the next steps we plan to take, and how you can take them with us.
Please join us in these efforts … volunteer, donate, lend support now. But if you have already spent all the time you can and we have impressed upon you the importance of our undertaking, just click here.
| Thanks In Advance, Frank Millspaugh  Vice President for Development (86 y.o. and still planning ahead.) |