Eighteen years ago, Dr. Vasundhara Kalasapudi, best known as Dr. K, lost her father to vascular dementia. When her bookish father lost the ability to recognize the words or people he loved, she wanted to bring him from his small village in India to live with her in New York.
Dr. K was just starting her career as a physician here, and didn’t have the means to care for her father at home. But there were also no senior centers where she felt he would be comfortable.
The struggle to find culturally sensitive spaces for her elders ultimately led her to co-found India Home, a senior center that provides care to aging South Asians.
The origin story
Back when Dr. K was looking for a culturally sensitive space, the issue became even clearer when a friend and fellow doctor (who became a co-founder), struggled to care for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s.
“Even with severe dementia, her mother would come home and complain: ‘Why did you leave me there? They are different people. The food is different. Language is different. I don’t like it,’” Dr. K said.
It wasn’t lost on Dr. K and her friend that even as physicians familiar with available resources, they found it challenging to find appropriate care for their own parents. They wondered how much harder it must be for others.
After multiple community meetings, they and another friend established India Home in 2007 and opened the first senior center in 2008. And last year, the company opened a co-living space for seniors.
Co-living for South Asian seniors
The idea to open a co-living space for South Asian seniors came to Dr. K and others during the pandemic, when they saw loneliness at its most acute. “Even if they live with their children, they’re living in million-dollar homes, but the children are busy with their life,” Dr. K said. “[Their children] have to go out and work, and the grandchildren will go to the school, and then they become lonely and they feel like they are living in a big golden-gate jail.”
Dr. K was reading about various housing models and co-living — popular with millennials and recent transplants — stood out. Why not launch a co-living experiment with seniors? India Home’s board members immediately agreed. They envisioned older adults cooking together, playing games and watching movies together, having someone like them to chat with.
But it was key that seniors have the dignity of their own privacy. While the kitchen, living room, basement, and backyard are shared spaces, housemates have their own bedroom and attached bathroom. Rent is between $1,000 to $1,500 based on bedroom size, plus the shared cost of utilities.
As far as India Home board members can tell, it’s the first of this kind in New York State. With that came hurdles — such as a lack of government funding for a housing initiative where rent doesn’t meet operating costs.
But it also brings hope.
“We want to showcase this to city government, state government, and federal government, and to convince them this is a model for immigrant communities,” Dr. K said. “I’m pretty confident one of them will fund it next year.”
Care that connects
The staff at India Home’s residential facilities and senior centers all speak Hindi and Urdu, alongside other South Asian languages. India Home’s cultural program includes dance classes that range from garba and bhangra to Bollywood dance, yoga, and art.
India Home also serves a taste of home following the city’s Department for the Aging nutrition guidelines. At their Bangladeshi senior center, staff serve halal food. At their other facilities, they honor regional food differences throughout India by offering vegetarian staples like dal, rice, and roti. Sometimes they’ll make dal the South Indian way, other times the Gujarati way. Their center for Indo Caribbean seniors also reflects these cultural differences.
India Home now has five senior centers throughout Queens. One, focused on Bengali seniors, runs five days a week out of the Jamaica Muslim Center. Others run once a week. Last year, India Home launched a dementia day care program called Desi Dementia Day Care (3D Care) to support seniors facing some of the same diagnoses the co-founders’ parents did.
A dementia day care program
3D Care focuses on early to moderate stages of dementia, where activities like board games, puzzles, and Bollywood trivia help keep participants engaged. Low-impact chair yoga helps improve their motor skills and mobility as they start to lose motor functions.
“They get all competitive when it comes to the songs — they might not remember a lot, but they remember all the Bollywood songs,” said Samra Rashid, a licensed social worker at India Home.
India Home also offers a support group and other resources to caregivers, who often face their own challenges due to cultural differences: “We’re providing them support [and] education, a safe platform where they can … say those things which they before thought that they cannot say because it will make them an evil person,” Rashid said.
“Sometimes you’re mad because it’s too much looking at your loved one who’s fading away in front of your eyes, it makes you angry sometimes, and that is okay,” she said. “It makes us so happy and fulfilled that this is a safe place where they can sit and they can say it out loud. “It was [their] biggest challenge.”
Meanwhile, India Home’s biggest challenge is continuing to fund programs like 3D Care. Rashid says government grants are few and far between for a relatively new concept like dementia day care.
Meeting South Asian seniors’ needs
India Home also provides case management, helping seniors access basic city services – and more.
Many seniors at India Home have lost their ability to drive and lack alternative options to get around. So India Home provides transportation to certain centers and helps its members access food stamps and other resources.
Even when they’re not feeling it on a given day, seniors’ relationships with staff members who intimately understand their culture keeps them coming back.
Coming from a therapy background, Rashid was taught not to hug clients. But bonding is stronger than schooling.
“Those books are down the drain, because now I work here, so how can you not hug them?” Rashid said. “They feel offended. You have to hug everybody, every single person. You have to. And you call them auntie; we don’t call them by name.”
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(917) 288-7600
178-36 Wexford Terrace, Suite 2C
Jamaica, NY 11432
India Home is hosting a gala on Sunday Oct. 6 at Terrace on the Park in Queens. You can find more information at this link.
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