Vote with your Heart and Mind

It's election season. Bills, measures and initiative for improving the quality of care abound. Some propose additional staff training, others increase the regulations of senior care in a variety of settings.

As a senior care professional and a member of the sandwich generation (that's the place where you're smushed in the middle of two generations: your kids and your aging folks, spread liberally, as one person put it, not with mayo but with Ben-Gay), improving the quality of care of our nations elderly is a personal and professional priority.

While we're at it, we have to look down the road to make sure our own retirement savings and investments, not to mention Social Security, are managed as well as possible.

How do you know how to vote in a way that will actually result in real benefit?

Look at who is sponsoring the bill. Read the fine print. Listen to your local politicians, and ask them questions about their positions on social security, senior care and other vital issues.

Bottom line: get involved.

My daughters and I have been regular participants in the Race for the Cure event in our home town. The turn-out, until recently limited to women only, is third largest in the country.

When we participate in this event we look around us and see how strong we can be - what a difference we can make - when we all come together for one focused purpose.

I think on election day we might get a better perspective of our power if we all turned up at a voting center within the same 2 hour period. OK, I agree - it would be a logistical nightmare. But we'd get a different - and clearer - understanding of how powerful we are when we put our minds and our voices together for a cause.

Don't miss out on our own personal power trip this year. Get involved. Vote!