Enhancing a person’s quality of life means we look at the whole person, who they used to be, and who they are today. At Oakwood Creative Care, we celebrate the individuality of every person, their past experiences, and provide them with the tools needed to flourish and cultivate their strengths and interests. Receiving a diagnosis plays a pertinent role in defining the situation at hand and what comes after is the most important stepping stone in looking to the road ahead. 

Although dementia affects the brain’s ability to transmit messages, impacting functions of memory, emotion, and communication, every person living with dementia still craves the experience of creativity and variety while settling into their normal routine.

Mixing the opportunities to learn, create, and laugh is exactly the recipe needed to foster a foundation specifically formulated to engage and encourage our senior community. Over the past five years, Oakwood Creative Care and ALLE Learning have partnered to research and develop a new and innovative program that does just that, called Engaging at Home.

This well-rounded and innovative creative care curriculum utilizes adult language and terminology to enable participants to feel respected, allows participants to make their own choices, inspires moments of recall, reflection, and validation, encourages engagement and interaction with other adults, taps into different parts of the brain, generates new ideas, promotes critical and creative thinking, and celebrates accomplishments.

Even more importantly, Engaging at Home is an open service to all and offers wonderful and priceless opportunities for families and carepartners to partake in each activity alongside their loved ones, revisit favored sessions, and take the time to pause for moments of conversation, reflection, and connection.