Honoring adult care workers: ‘Our family is love’

By Jeffrey Kanode, RealWV

Most people are familiar with the foster care program for children, but far fewer people, perhaps, know that the Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) also has a similar program for the elderly and adults with special needs. 

It’s called the Adult Family Care program, and it started in the 1970s. “It’s a program that allows people who are unable to live on their own, independently, to live in a family-like setting. It keeps them from having to be institutionalized. The provider opens up their home to care for an aged or disabled adult,” said Karen Thompson, the Adult Service Program Manager and Adult Family Care Home Finding Specialist of the Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Monroe, and Summers counties district. “We work with adults from the age of eighteen and up.”

According to Thompson, the provider helps the client navigate daily living: they provide transportation to medical appointments and guarantee the client’s access to community life, like church services or senior citizen or community center activities. “We encourage the client to be in the community as much as possible,” Thompson noted. 

The provider buys food, prepares or helps the client prepare meals, and the provider takes care of the client’s clothing needs. Each client has a dedicated space of their own within the provider’s home.  “The client cannot need any type of skilled nursing care or be deemed a threat to themselves or to others. They have to agree to be in the program and be able to pay a portion of the care,” Thompson continued.

“Our providers are very special people. They are willing to open up their homes. They are willing to give of themselves. Most of the time, providers tell me the love and appreciation they receive from the clients is as much as a gift as they give to them,” Thompson reflected.

Three of those “special people” were on hand at a recent celebration at Dorie Miller Park in Lewisburg to mark Adult Family Care Appreciation Month, declared by Governor Jim Justice. One of those three providers, Louise Boggs, received special recognition. The ninety-two year old Boggs has been a foster parent and an adult family care provider since the early 1970s. “Louise has dedicated over fifty years to serving some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable populations,” said Christi Hicks, the West Virginia DHHR Adult Protective Supervisor for the Greenbrier District.

Boggs said she considers every child or teen she has ever cared for, and every adult who has ever lived in her home through the Adult Services program, part of her family. “Our family is love,” she declared. 

The lively, verbose Boggs said that she became both a foster parent and an adult services provider because she was used to having a big family. “I was one of fifteen children in my family growing up,” she said, “and I had two children. When they grew up and I became a foster parent, it was like having children of my very own again.”  Boggs usually foster parented teenagers, and she admits to lavish care. “It was like having a child when you couldn’t think you could. I spoiled them. My babies,” she said, smiling broadly.

Boggs said she loved being a provider for elderly and special needs adults, too.  She cared for one client until they became ill with cancer.  Boggs cared for the client right up until the client was moved into hospice care, at Peyton House. In Fairlea.

Francine Lockhart currently provides care for three clients. In her professional life, she has worked in the offices of factories and children’s homes. She also served as a house parent in a children’s home, in Indianapolis. While she cherishes her memories and the legacy of her previous work, Lockhart names this work–being a provider for vulnerable adults– as the most rewarding. “The three people I take care of—they are safe and they are loved,” she said.  “I love them. I am blessed.”

Linda Lyons became a provider around twenty years ago.  She has allowed her home to become home for many clients over the years, but much like Boggs, she has special memories of one client who became sick and died. “I stayed with him until the very end,” she recalled. “I wanted him to know until the very end that he wasn’t alone.”

Wade Samples, the statewide Adult Services Directory, and Rebecah Carson, WVDHHR deputy commission, joined a large group of DHHR workers from Greenbrier County for the celebration of the adult care providers. “We need more people like you,” Sample told Boggs, Lockhart, and Lyons. “There’s not a word to describe what you do. You do it out of the kindness of your heart. You make a difference. The people come into your home. You become family.”

There are currently one hundred-twenty-two adult clients living in one hundred providers’ homes throughout West Virginia, with five providers in the Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Monroe and Summers district.  Those numbers have been decreasing, Karen Thompson said. “A lot of times people learn about our program through word-of-mouth, so family members tend to become providers.   A lot of our providers are aging out. We really need to increase our providers because the need is so great,” she said.

Thompson and Christi Hicks both emphasized that providers are trained and given many resources to help them care for their clients.   Anyone interested in becoming a provider can contact their local DHHR office to begin the process.   The testimonies—sometimes tearful ones—of Louise Boggs, Francine Lockhart, and Linda Lyons echo out of a picnic shelter into the early autumn wind, saying that the endeavor becomes a true blessing.