On October 19, ORANJ had its first post-Covid meeting at Fellowship Village.
Ron Whalin, president of ORANJ, would have been presiding, but as he explained in email the following day, “I wanted to start the fall meeting with a bang. I tripped on a curb while running out to greet a bus. Someone brought a wheelchair and pushed me into our nearby Medical Group office. They bandaged me and took me to my apartment for elbow x rays. My dear wife came home and looked after me and then went back to her Plenary job. Many called me and wished me a quick recovery. I am better this morning and starting another busy day.”
More than 100 residents from New Jersey CCRCS were helped by more than two dozen extremely efficient Fellowship Village volunteers and were provided with delicious lunch by Fellow Senior Living. Once again FSL proved to be an excellent venue for our meeting.
The morning speaker, Dan Seeger, taught us about Decision Making Pathologies, using examples of bad decisions with which we were familiar such as the NASA tragedies, New Coke, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Good intentions can still lead to bad decisions. Dan listed the causes of decision-making pathologies and concluded by asserting that “We owe it to our organizations and our organizational colleagues to be quite conscientious about avoiding decision-making pathologies. For, as Aristotle wisely said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
The National Continuing Care Residents Association (NaCCRA) has provided several documents to help CCRCs address governance anomalies and financial issues. These, as well as the text of Dan’s talk, are provided at the top of the ORANJ Publications page at oranjccrc.org/publications/
In the afternoon we learned about “Covid-19 Side Effects: New Scams.”
Plenary packet documents which are available online include:
Legislative Committee Report, Communications Committee Report (with a colorful map showing location of CCRCs in our five regions ), Dan Seeger Bio, Afternoon Speakers’ Bios, 2022 Occupancy Report, the ORANJ Trifold Brochure, and the August 2022 issue of our newsletter.
2 Responses
The plenaries of the day were most informative and interestingly presented. The lunch was just appetising and very well presented, and for once I had the opportunity to walk around and see some of the program sites. I had attended the ORANJ meetings before, both the Spring and the Fall sessions every year, for quite a few years, until the breaking out of the Pandemic . I was so happy and grateful that we could resume this year after the sad break. It has always been interesting to meet and sit with the residents of the other CCRCs. And the Winchester Gardens friends who have not attended or known about the ORANJ meetings before must be happy to take part this time. The wonderful and extremely helpful Fellowship Village volunteers were very friendly and not tired of being repeatedly asked for directions.
So sorry about Ron’s accident. Wishing him complete and speedy recovery, God bless,
Amy Lau 23rd October, 2022
Interesting! Please let me know when the next plenary meeting is scheduled.