Shannon Shea with client Bob

Shannon Shea, Founding Executive Director of Elder Love USA, has made it her mission to make in-home care accessible and affordable for seniors. She can quickly recall the impetus behind her decision to help others, which sprang from leaving her job in outside sales, and eventually receiving her bachelor’s in gerontological social work.

“I would go into people’s homes and try to figure out what resources and services I could connect them to,” she recalls of interning. “And even though they lived in very affluent neighborhoods, these mostly older widowed gals had no family, no kids, and they still have to pay their property taxes, their medicine, their groceries, their light bill, and they didn’t have the extra $40 to $50 an hour minimum to hire Homestead or some of these bigger for-profit organizations.”

“I realized that these individuals basically need an adopt-a-granddaughter program,” she adds. “Somebody who can just come in once a week for an hour or two, change the fitted sheets, take out the trash, do the laundry, open jars, scrub and clean and stuff that ‘Betty’ can’t really do anymore but she’s perfectly safe at home as long as she has that little bit of extra support.”

More ideas sprang from these interning days, and soon enough Elder Love USA was born. Today, the nonprofit provides in-home care at a reduced rate, thanks to a combination of client support, partnerships with managed care partners, various fundraisers, individual donations, sponsorships, and other grants.

A recent grant from IECF through the Riverside County ARPA Fund, in fact, has given the nonprofit a way to hire a client care coordinator, a position that Shea says was greatly missing in the organization.

Client Dennis with Caregiver Deon

“We desperately needed someone to be in charge of the continuity between answering the phone and having a client need care, and then hiring employees, and doing all the onboarding,” she says. “The role would also connect the caregivers to the clients. It was like this one position that a bunch of us were kind of all trying to do, and it was chaos. So that funding helped. It made everything seamless and fabulous.”

Elder Love USA provides an initial consultation to determine if the services are a right fit. Once a client is onboarded, the nonprofit requires a two-hour minimum for caregiving clients. There are no long-term contracts.

Several of the organization’s programs stand out. VetsAssist, for instance, provides assistance to wartime veterans or spouses of wartime veterans through the V.A.’s “Aid and Attendance” benefit.  It’s ideal for individuals who meet certain medical and financial requirements.

Additionally, Elder Love USA has strong partnerships with Fry’s, Food4Less, and Ralphs, which allow customers to donate to the nonprofit directly. Meanwhile, car donations help the organization fund vital programs and services that support its mission.

Shea is quick to note that she’s “very transparent” about the organization’s pricing.

“We’re still way less than $40 and $50 an hour,” she says. “We’re $28 an hour and we have a two-hour minimum, which is still a lot better than most. But my goal is to get it down to $10 or $15 an hour.”

Looking ahead, Shea hopes to grow and make a deeper impact.

“I would definitely like locals to know we exist,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been talking about it all day long for nine years, there’s so many people I run into, but I just want people to know about us. We are the only non-profit caregiving agency, and we want to help as many people as we can.”

Learn more at Elder Love USA at elderloveusa.org.

This story originally appeared in the Desert Sun, October 2024.

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