Aging Forward

Raised in Ohio, David Dunkelman, M.S., J.D., expanded his experience by traveling around the world for a year after graduating from college. He visited 26 countries and three war zones, and observed many ways people live and die. He left the United States an angry young man and returned a patriot after seeing how so many other societies functioned. After graduating from Temple University School of Law, he helped his family’s apparel company grow to an organization distributing to 5,000 retailers nationally. The company closed when computers suddenly disrupted the nation’s centuries-old clothing supply chain, an ominous preview to what would also happen to aging in America.

Changing focus, Dunkelman earned a master’s degree from the Center for Studies in Aging at the University of North Texas, after which he eventually landed in Buffalo, New York, where for 30 years he was the founding President and CEO of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Campus, one of the nation’s largest and most multifaceted campuses for older people. The campus was the first such organization to be named a winner of the national Peter F. Drucker Award for Innovation in Nonprofit Management.

Among his many individual awards are the Community Leadership Award from the Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies, Buffalo (2013), and the Dr. Evan Calkins Meritorious Service Award for “lifetime contributions to the field of aging,” presented by the Western New York Network in Aging, Inc. (2007).

Using creative problem-solving techniques developed at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dunkelman has consulted nationally with more than 25 communities, helping them to develop strategic approaches to facility and programmatic design for older people. He writes and speaks about aging in America.

Martha Dunkelman, Ph.D.

Martha Dunkelman, Ph.D., is a writer and editor who has written numerous articles, reviews, and brochures, as well as serving as book editor for an online periodical. She has also written and edited materials for the Educational Testing Service and the College Board. She credits her father, Dr. Maurice Levine, with teaching her to write in her teenage years, when she was not always the most willing student.

A graduate of Wellesley College, she later received a doctorate from New York University under the wise and kind guidance of H. W. Janson and spent many years in teaching and administration as a professor at Wright State University, the University at Buffalo, and Canisius College.

She learned about the care of older people from decades of bearing witness to the struggles and achievements of her husband David.

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Welcome

Introduction

Part I: How We Got Here

1. The New Scale of Aging


2. Where Are All the Older Adults?


3. Aging Care in the Present: A Holdover from the Industrial Age


4. Attempting to Address the Problem: The New Home


5. Dealing with Governmental Bureaucracy


6. Confronting the Care System for Older Adults in the United States


7. Care for Older Adults Meets the Changing World

Part II: What is Really Happening

1. Chronic Conditions and Benescence: The State of Well-Being in Older Age


2. Delivering and Paying for the State of Benescence


3. The Law of Interchangeable Interventions

Part III: Our Future Aging Experience

1. We’re Not Bankrupt: The Future of Aging Through the Lens of the Law of Interchangeable Interventions


2. Business Enters the Stage


3. The New World of Aging


4. Government Aging Policy


5. Aging Revealed


6. The New Aging: At Home in the Neighborhood

References

Index