Aging Services Advisory Council - Oct. 20, 2025

Meeting Called to Order

Quorum is majority.

Jeanie gave a broad overview of the upcoming Area Plan and then went into detail on the various focus areas of the Area Plan.

• The first Focus Area is Information and Assistance. She explained that the key tasks and goals related to this focus area, primarily working on making sure that there is at least one outreach event a month. She also said that distributing resources in languages other than English and meeting with community-based organizations at least quarterly were goals. ASAC members recommended advertising on buses, holding informational sessions at Community Centers, partnering with local senior housing providers.
• Focus Area: Nutritional services. The primary goal is to increase the number of older adults accessing SNAP benefits. She was asked if it was possible to see the number of eligible older adults versus the number of older adults accessing SNAP services. Jeanie said that since the State manages SNAP data about eligibility wasn’t available to the County, but that they could compare referrals sent by the ADRC program and successful applications. Other goals include increasing nutritional services to BIPOC and historically underserved populations and training community patterns on how to increase nutritional funding.
• Focus Area: Health Promotion. Goals include increasing funding to underserved and underrepresented populations and providing more training opportunities for local leaders. Training topics would include things like chronic disease management, care giver tools, pain management, and fall prevention amongst others.
• Focus Area: Family and Unpaid Caregiver Support. Goals include increasing awareness of and access to family caregiver support programs and relatives as parent programs and expanding program capacity and increasing recipients of caregiver services by 25%.
• Focus Area: Legal Services. Goals include spreading knowledge and utilization of Older Americans Act funded legal services, pro bono services offered by large law firms, and expanding the Gatekeeper program, which trains people such as bank tellers and mail carriers to identify possible signs of elder abuse.
• Focus Area: Older Native Americans. The County is already meeting with local tribal leaders. There was interest in having those leaders speak to the ASAC, but Jeanie said that due to well-founded distrust of government agencies they might not be receptive to requests to speak.
• Focus Area: Behavioral Health. Goals include increasing the capacity of older adult serving organizations and recruiting more community members to support the behavioral health needs of older adults. Jeanie said that the establishment of and work done by the Behavioral Health subcommittee has been very helpful towards furthering this goal.
• Focus Area: Transportation Services. Goals include working with the TriMet Lift program (no relation to the ridesharing app) and increasing outreach and services provided.
• Focus Area: Volunteering. The primary goal is to increase the number of volunteers each year by 5%. Unfortunately, Social Services no longer has a central volunteer coordinator.

The next steps will be to establish subcommittees to discuss each focus area. Jeanie will work to assign both volunteers and staff members to each subcommittee.

• Sonya asked about how the layoffs to Public and Behavioral Health divisions will affect services for older adults. Tracy said that the Public Health layoffs are due to the Covid budget cliff that the County knew was coming. The behavioral Health staff are having their duties taken over by the state.