05/20/2025 Commissioners Meeting [16:43-21:48]

Thank you for your time. If you have any questions. Any questions? We do appreciate it's worried what you can absorb. That's why I got papers you can take home. I do appreciate have we. I do understand the importance of what you folks are doing. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next on the agenda is Diane Matthews. Yes. Yes. Will dimension that work? I knew the else. Hi. Yes. I'm Diane Matthews. I'm from the World Dimension Network. I knew how. The World Dimension Network is a grant project that's been around since 2020. We're in the second phase of an extension grant. And our sole purpose is to increase awareness. We do stigma, provide support for families, and for people living with dementia, and to help educate me professional caregivers and the area on best practices on how to take care of a person living with dementia. Part of that though is the Dimension Family America Dimension Family in Wants County, and surrounding families, efforts that we've been doing all along. So in 2018, actually before the great even happened, Wants County was designated by Dimension Family America as a Dimension Family community. And what that means is that there were several stakeholders in the community that came together and said, hey, there's, we want to kind of take the lead and make sure that our community is dementia capable, dementia aware. Our population in Wants County is about 3% higher than the state average in people over the age of 65. So in our community, 20.8% of our citizens, so one out of every five people who live here are over the age of 65. Over the age of 65, one in many people have dementia. So that is potentially the large number of people living in our community doing a math of about 9,000, 9,320, I think, people over the age of 65. So over 1,000 people in our community are living with dementia. In our living at home, people are typically diagnosed with dementia until the end of the stage dementia. And there's certainly not enough nursing homes space to have everybody living in nursing homes. So that means that the vast majority, 80-90% of people living with dementia live at home. They live with their family, or sometimes they live alone, and they're trying to navigate our community. A lot of times people living with dementia are going to businesses, or into organizations, or into offices, county offices, government offices, and have some issues of some concerns. And people who are working with organizations need to know how to recognize dementia, how to maybe improve the communication with the person living with dementia, who's standing in front of them, maybe having some concerns or some issues. And so that's what a dementia-friendly training does. It's a one-hour training, and we've trained numerous businesses, all the city offices, all the government offices in Orange County, in Martin County, in Jackson County. And those are the four counties. Now it's Martin, Orange and Jackson, that are great covers. So now they're going to bring us training to Lawrence County offices. And I've been speaking with Amy Voorhees. And she would like to, she's very passionate about bringing that to the county offices, and would like to use the voter registration room over in the plaza to host a training for the county employees to be able to say that our county government is too much a family, that we understand that our community is at risk for having a high level of people living with dementia, who need our support. And so that's what we ask is for you guys today, is to allow us to use the voter registration room in training in the county, so that our county offices are considered dementia-friendly. We can windows that, we can put, we have little window queries that we put on office windows, say hello to dementia-friendly, our employees, then we feel confident in communicating, interacting with people living with dementia, and hopefully have a little bit of a toolkit on how to make the experience better for everybody. So I do have a packet of information that I brought, just in case you guys want it, that has some statistics about dementia in the United States, has information about who we are, as the real dimension network. We are 100% funded, everything we do is free, we do individual consultations,