Meet Pamela Garofolo, Winner of the 2024 LeadingAge Leadership Award

April 16, 2024

BY Gene Mitchell

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The recipient of our inaugural Leadership Award is a leader in dementia care and resident engagement as well as a builder of strong relationships between staff, residents, and families.

Pamela Garofolo​​​​, corporate director of Tapestries at United Methodist Communities(UMC), Neptune, NJ, is known within her organization as a tireless trainer, creator, and influencer of staff. She combines expertise in serving older adults living with dementia, creative program development skills, and an ability to help staff serve older adults and their families by building relationships and adapting services to the needs and wishes of residents.

LeadingAge is pleased to announce that Garofolo has been selected as the first winner of the new LeadingAge Leadership Award, which she will receive at the LeadingAge Leadership Summit, April 15-17 in Washington, DC.

Empowering Residents Living With Dementia

One of Garofolo's primary responsibilities at UMC is overseeing its Tapestriesmemory care program, which serves more than 90 residents. Located within the assisted living communities at the organization's four New Jersey CCRCs, the Tapestries neighborhoods provide what she calls "resident-directed living" that focuses on residents' strengths, rather than emphasizing frailties.

"Our policies and processes are designed around empowering an individual, even if they have cognitive impairment, to direct their own lives," Garofolo says. Tapestries residents are integrated as much as possible with assisted living residents in other neighborhoods. "We do natural rising, [follow] more liberalized medication paths, and really allow our residents to direct their lives." In addition to promoting independence, she also emphasizes and fosters connections. Not only are universal workers permanently assigned to their neighborhoods, their training-designed by Garofolo-includes a focus on learning to develop tight personal bonds with residents with the intention of making their home a real home. "I can't stand that term 'home-like environment,'" she says. "I don't want to live in a home-like environment, I want my actual home." The Tapestries training, required for memory care staff, is also offered to any employees who want it, and has gained National Alzheimer's Association certification.

Garofolo began her aging services career as an activities aide. She went on to become an activities director before going to graduate school. She joined UMC in 2008, immediately after earning her master's degree in psychology, and helped to develop its social model of memory care, which became Tapestries in 2016. She is still learning, now working on a Ph.D. in gerontology leadership from Concordia University Chicago. Her dissertation, she says, will probably be on teaching empathy and compassion to direct caregivers, particularly those working with residents living with cognitive impairment.

A Commitment to Resident and Employee Engagement

Garofolo's work is not limited to Tapestries. She also leads UMC's Community Life program (the organization's name for activities) and its household model culture change programming. A current focus of her Community Life work is implementing what she calls a "therapeutic approach" to resident engagement, a strengths- and wellness-based model built on the five traditional domains of wellness (physical, social, emotional, cognitive, spiritual), plus "occupational," related to residents' desire to work and give back to the community. She enjoys helping create a "culture of engagement" among all UMC employees, who are expected to engage with residents whenever they can. For instance, some business office staff will join residents for bridge when the players need partners, and Corporate Director of Marketing and Sales Jacquie Miller has been known to play Rummikub at several sites.

Education, Both for Staff and Families

Last year, Garofolo was instrumental in the creation of UMC University, which provides leadership training to people managers. The initiative grew in part out of a retention and recruitment committee launched at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and built on the fact that many registered nurses come into long-term care and-despite having no training in managing people-are put in supervisory positions. "One of the things we identified was that this could be a gift, not a curse," she says. "If you come to UMC and you are developed as a leader, that is an attractive thing." UMC U, as it's called by staff, now features classes taught by UMC leaders from human resources, IT, and other departments. Each participant must complete four in-person classes, held quarterly.

Outside the UMC walls, Garofolo has set up support groups for family caregivers, which have evolved into education and networking groups, sometimes held in partnership with the Alzheimer's Association, local elder law firms, or hospice providers. She also does memory screenings, complete with coaching about how individuals can talk to their doctors about cognitive issues.

Asked what drew her to work-and stay-in memory care, Garofolo says it comes naturally. "Honestly, I like to hang out with somebody with cognitive impairment," she says. "There's something about living in the moment that is very zen. People pay lots of money to go on a mountain and learn how to live in the moment, and you just spend 15 minutes with somebody who's got cognitive impairment, and you are forced to live in the moment. I think that's a gift."

Garofolo enjoys helping family caregivers learn to care for loved ones with dementia, as they get beyond their anxiety and fear and learn to appreciate their loved ones as they are. She also enjoys helping staff learn to build relationships with residents, and then internalize and pass that knowledge on to others: "To lead somebody is to empower them to go do it for somebody else, to spread the love, so to speak. It's one of my favorite things to watch people 'get it,' and I think you can teach someone to 'get it.'"