On October 4, 2018, The American Muslim Senior Society (AMSS), in partnership with the Islamic Center of Maryland (ICM), hosted a dialogue at ICM for seniors in Montgomery County and their caregivers. The dialogue, titled “Health and Wellness,” was the third in a series of four community dialogues on healthy aging, community services and support.
The previous two dialogues, held in various locations in Maryland, were titled “Caregiving,” and “Basics: Memory Loss, Dementia, Alzheimer’s.” The last and final dialogue, titled, “Planning For the Inevitable,” will be held at the Islamic Society of the Washington Area (ISWA) on Sunday, Dec. 2nd, 2018 from 2-4 p.m.
The purpose of these dialogues is to get feedback from the elder community about their needs. Stakeholders at the “Health and Wellness” dialogue were invited to educate community members about chronic conditions that seniors can suffer from and ask the community members what they are most in need of. It was a small intimate setting where participants felt comfortable interacting with the speakers. The stakeholders made the program interactive by asking questions about what older adults need to stay healthy and waited for answers from the audience members who raised their hands and shared their thoughts. The stakeholders then shared services and resources that they provide, such as transportation, fitness and recreation, social activities, health and nutrition, among others.
This program, according to Mona Negm, founder of AMSS, is a pilot project that has never been tested. AMSS, a non-profit organization, founded just a year and a half ago, aims to be provide services and resources to Muslim seniors in Montgomery County. Negm believes that “the Muslim community, especially among the older people, is the most underserved community.” She says that many don’t even know their rights, or where to find resources. That is what motivated her to establish AMSS. Negm says she hopes to take the blueprint for this project and do it with interfaith communities in the future.
Negm credits the success and strength of the project thus far to the partnerships AMSS has made both within the Muslim community and the outside partnerships with the health and long-term care agencies.
The first step was forming the Muslim Advisory Council (MAC), which represents the 11 county Islamic centers and their Imams and community leaders. AMSS decided that MAC would be the one to guide AMSS to identify the whereabouts of the seniors and their needs. MAC helped select the ambassadors from those communities-people who speak their language, understand their culture, and are known in their communities. AMSS then realized that in order to have services and resources they could tap into, they would need to put together the most important health and long term care agencies in Montgomery County. So they gathered representatives from nineteen agencies together and established the Stakeholders Advisory Council (SAC). AMSS, together with the help of SAC, train the ambassadors by giving them all the information that they need from the stakeholders to channel to the community members. Some of those stakeholders include the Commission on Aging (COA), and representatives from Health and Human Services (HHS), among others.
Donna Phillips is retired and has worked in the county for a long time. She has worked with Negm for 3 years on this project as a stakeholder, even before AMSS was established. She is the chair of The Vital Living Network, a voluntary group of experts in aging in the county. Phillips says “the project is about building a structure in the mosque to provide help for seniors in each individual community.”
Each mosque has two ambassadors that have been extensively trained by the stakeholders in areas such as dementia, transportation, end of life care, and health and human services. They provided training in these areas last year. This year, she says, they are at the community level. They need volunteers to identify what services are most needed for each mosques community, whether that be financial assistance, transportation, legal assistance, food delivery, information about healthcare services, etc.
The purpose of the community dialogues, according to Negm, is to hear what the community wants and needs and better serve them. Rather than AMSS come to the community and tell them what they can offer to them, they are hoping to ask the community what they need and create those services for them. By the end of the fourth dialogue they will collect the results of the community members feedback and develop programs and services based on their needs. Volunteers that they collect at these dialogues will also work with ambassadors to help implement these programs and services.
Negm predicts that events like this will connect people and sensitize the service providers and people from the county to the needs of the Muslim community. “For the first time in Montgomery County history,” she says, “we are bringing the providers to the community and getting them to learn about our culture and tradition and needs, so that the services can be developed.“ She also expressed her joy to have the chairman of the commission on aging participating in the most recent dialogue. The chairman is responsible for developing policy that is implemented by the Montgomery County Council and is funded, and that funding, she says, will now take into account the need and concerns of the Muslim seniors and care takers.
Phillips sees this project and community outreach programs like this as a form of preventative measure. She believes that “as the population gets older, as adult children are working and cannot provide care, and seniors are living longer and the opportunity to have more chronic conditions and dementia grows, its really important to build an infrastructure now-before it gets to the crisis point.” Phillips thinks that the program is reflective of the community and hopes that the community can build the resources needed to help their seniors.
Negm hopes to get more young people involved in the project through volunteer work and learning about the mission of AMSS. “If they are lucky enough,” she says, “than they will one day live to be seniors too.” One of her future goals is to
develop a work force to train Certified Nursing Agents (CNAs). She wants to train and give scholarships to at least 35 people who are multilingual to become CNA’s, and have them work with universities. Although she has many aspirations and plans for AMSS, she also reminds herself that AMSS is only a year and a half old and they need to pace themselves and do it right.
For more information about AMSS, including available health and wellness resources please visit: https://www.amssmd.org/
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