How Parent Projects Can Help You Care For Elderly Loved Ones With Bina Colman
Growing Older with GustoShow Notes
Struggling to care for aging parents while juggling your own family? Today, Bina Coleman discusses the challenges of being part of the sandwich generation and the importance of finding support groups and resources. She also talks about the future of Parent Projects, a company that helps families stay organized and communicate with each other about caring for elderly loved ones, including the use of artificial intelligence to help families better care for their aging parents. Don't miss out! Learn how to make caring for your aging parents a little easier.
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How Parent Projects Can Help You Care For Elderly Loved Ones With Bina Colman
Hello and welcome to the podcast, Growing Older with Gusto. My name is Gail Zugerman, and my husband, Charlie, likes to joke that his name is Gusto. But actually, this podcast is created to show people in younger generations how to grow older in a positive and productive way by having guests on the show who are doing just that or helping others to do just that. Today, we have an episode about the sandwich generation, and I don't necessarily mean those of you who grew up eating subs or hoagies or Philadelphia cheesesteaks, whatever.
So, our guest today is a younger woman named Bina Coleman, who's going to tell us how she started her business out of seeing a need in the marketplace for balancing a full-time career, raising young kids, and having elderly parents who had health care needs of their own. It is a juggling act, one that's been addressed by the media, but Bina Coleman saw an opportunity, and she's very busy with her own life. She lives outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and she managed to find the time to create her original business, which was called Compassionate Callers, and it's recently morphed into Parent Projects, which she'll talk about. But it's a business targeted to those people who need support with numerous activities that are busy, and her business was set up to really help people who are in the sandwich generation have peace of mind and know that their elderly parents are living a good older life while they maintain theirs. She also has a degree in gerontology and over a decade of experience in the field of elderly care.
So, I'd like to get started; she has so much to tell us. She has a great story. So welcome to the show, Bina.
Thank you for that introduction. It was very good. It was a great introduction. It's all true. There are so many of us.
Right, so start us out. Tell our listeners about your story, about your background, and your personal experiences that led to the development of Parent Projects.
I grew up here in Phoenix, and my parents actually owned the first four franchises of Home Instead Senior Care. I was in sixth grade, so in 1996, they were literally one of the first home care agencies in Arizona or Phoenix, and now there's over 500, I want to say. Growing up, this is all we heard: the elder world, the seniors, the caregivers, so my brother and I just knew this world when none of our friends did.
The Sandwich-Generation Caregiver
When it was time for me to get my degree, it was kind of a no-brainer to do gerontology, though it's extremely niche, and there's not many of us. But fast forward, I am married, I have two little kids; they're still little. So, even back when my father was living in a memory care facility and then passed, they were even younger. But I truly became a sandwich generation caregiver because I was working full time. I was doing sales for home care, home health, and hospice, and I was also visiting my dad, like I said, in a memory care unit.
We were lucky enough to place them in a beautiful place in Scottsdale, so that was wonderful, truthfully. But, you know, I'd show up with both kids and just think there's something missing in this continuum of care for everybody, memory or not, or whatever maybe they're going through. I thought
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