{"id":20868,"date":"2014-03-08T14:09:02","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T19:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=20868"},"modified":"2014-07-08T14:14:08","modified_gmt":"2014-07-08T18:14:08","slug":"goes-around-comes-around-emu-and-virginia-mennonite-retirement-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2014\/goes-around-comes-around-emu-and-virginia-mennonite-retirement-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Goes around, comes around: EMU and Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the first decades of the 20th century, simultaneous efforts arose with the Virginia Mennonite Conference to establish institutions that might sit like bookends at either end of our lives: a school and home for the elderly. The first bit came together relatively quickly, with the school we now know as EMU admitting its first students in 1917.<\/p>\n
Progress was considerably slower on the retirement home, though, and it was not for another 37 years \u2013 long enough for EMU\u2019s first rosy-cheeked students to go gray themselves \u2013 that the Virginia Mennonite Home (VMH) opened on the far side of Park Woods in 1954. Giving EMU a few decades to get its programs up and running was handy in the sense that the new home had a local talent pool to draw from. Dr. Merle <\/strong>Eshleman \u201929<\/strong> split his time as a physician between VMH, EMU and a nearby private practice, while Elizabeth Showalter Martin \u201930<\/strong> was one of the first nurses on its staff. A public address system in the original brick building (since torn down) piped programs from the college out to the residents. A full accounting of the tangled, back-and-forth relationship between EMU and VMRC in those early days would fill books.<\/p>\n
When VMH opened, it was the first modern retirement home in the area. With that accomplished, its leaders soon began thinking about ways to keep ahead of the curve. To this end, in 1974 the board of directors asked John R. Mumaw<\/strong> \u2013 EMU\u2019s president from 1948 to 1965 \u2013 to lead a strategic planning study. Mumaw\u2019s approach was thorough, lasting more than three years, and included tours of other retirement homes as far away as Denmark.<\/p>\n
One of the major recommendations in the resulting report was finding ways to make life at VMH seem as normal and non-hospital-like as possible (it is not coincidental that the Virginia Mennonite Home became the cozier-sounding Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community, or VMRC, in 1978).<\/p>\n
Realizing that vision for familiar, comfortable care has been a process in the gradual making ever since. It took a major step forward in the spring of 2013, when VMRC opened Virginia\u2019s first Green House\u00ae homes, based on a model pioneered in 2003 in Mississippi as a way to care for residents in a setting as home-like as possible. In each of these three new homes, together known as VMRC\u2019s Woodland Park community, about 10 people live together, sharing their meals, their time and, as they are able, their chores, with each other and staff who provide round-the-clock, full nursing care.<\/p>\n
Another need highlighted in Mumaw\u2019s report was for affordable housing for the elderly. Within a few years, VMRC broke ground on Heritage Haven, with substantial funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Completed in 1981, it remains the area\u2019s only federally subsidized housing in a retirement community.<\/p>\n
Today, around 730 people live at VMRC, making it the largest of the three major retirement communities in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. Think about the math for a second (the combined city-county population is in excess of 125,000 people) and the following fact isn\u2019t nearly as surprising as it might first sound: only 10 percent of adults in this country ever move to a retirement community. With an eye toward future growth and continuing to meet the needs of the aging, serving the 90 percent who won\u2019t ever actually move to VMRC is something the organization \u201creally has a mission for,\u201d said Regina Schweitzer \u201978, MBA \u201906<\/strong>, vice-president for residential living.*<\/a><\/p>\n
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