Council on Aging of Buncombe County

Resource coordination medicare / benefits enrollment center - - in 2022, more than 3,000 contacts, 199 enrollment events, 22 classes, and more than 1,037,000 reached via ads. In the first quarter of 2023, we had 747 client contacts, 54 outreach and enrollment events, 6 classes, and more than 1,200 reached through ads. Our benefits enrollment program for seniors in need served 1,046 clients, garnering 1.6 million in benefits. We opened our medicare center, with support from the dogwood health trust and donors. The center provides volunteers with a comfortable space to meet with clients in the heart of south asheville. We have two new sponsors, van winkle law firm and mast general store, that we have earmarked for medicare services. Affordable care act - - over the past two years, coabc increased program staffing to include three full-time bilingual navigators along with our program director serving nine western north carolina counties. Over the last two open enrollments, we saw 289 more clients, filled 145 more appointments, and had a 6% overall increase in enrollments. We saw promising increases in spanish-speaking attendees and we had 88 more renewals overall. An average of 23% are first-time enrollees. We increased our outreach events from 117 events to 221 events this past year. Not all the credit for our success rests with our coabc navigators. Mcdowell access to care and health (match) and toe river project access (trpa) in avery, yancey, and mitchell counties are both carereach programs. Carereach is a partner and subgrantee of ours that we have worked closely with for years. In addition to aca navigation, we assist consumers to enroll in primary care, specialty care, and - when necessary - financial assistance. Our navigators worked with the premium and copayment assistance program (pcap), a part of the north carolina hiv medication assistance program (hmap) to help enrollees across the state find the right aca insurance plan.

Senior dining & wellness - - senior dining continues to grow we served over 39,500 meals, including cold meals to take home at thanksgiving, thanks to consumer contributions, the block grant funding, and arpa funding. We were able to serve 224 new participants and 498 unique individuals. We continued to offer dine-in and curbside pick-up this past year. Participants enjoyed the first all sites picnic celebrating older americans month. When asked about overall health 40% said their health was better since attending senior dining. Intake of fruits and vegetables increased for 48% of survey takers and 41% stated they increased their exercise activity. 45% of respondents reported decreased feelings of depression. 95% said they had more people to talk to by participating in this program and all respondents said they would recommend the program to a friend.

Community services - care management community services staff assist Buncombe County residents with understanding and accessing a variety of services throughout the community. Our staff connect online, over the phone, in-person, or via any "no wrong door" approach to meet our client's needs. We helped our clients access 59,955 in caregiver respite funds, answered over 6,500 information and assistance calls, completed 58 minor home repair projects, and did care management for 44 in-home aide recipients totaling more than 500,000. We served over 100 clients in homebound food delivery and our volunteers provided transportation for more than 150 client appointments.

Other accomplishments: our organization continues to make great strides to increase private support as well as enhance our infrastructure to expand services, innovate programming outside of traditional government grants, and collaborate with grassrootsorganizations and other nonprofits. We continue to "stand in the gap" of services for older adults in our service area. We continue to be a living wage certified employer through justeconomics and further our efforts for program evaluation, iversityequityinclusionaccessibil... a "hub and spoke" model of service, and integrating in cross-sector partnerships that include clinical settings. We completed our recovery from a ransomware incident in fy22 and successfully regained access to our information, began rebuilding our it environment and developed a relationship with epsilon, Inc. for staff training, dark web screening, and enhanced security monitoring as well as adding cloud storageand additional network support for the organization. This has caused our it technology expenses to increase as shown on the functional expenses in fy2023.