ADVENTURES IN CARING FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
The mission of the Adventures in Caring Foundation is two-fold: 1) To lift the spirits and heal the emotional distress of those who are socially isolated while severely ill, injured, aging or dying. 2) To advance nursing, doctoring, and caregiving by showing how compassion is communicated, as a skill that enables healing. Our vision is to cultivate the practice of compassion to improve well-being for the whole person: body, mind, heart, and soul.
About This Cause
Adventures in Caring (AiC) conducts an intergenerational program that improves the well-being (makes life worth living) for 800 socially isolated seniors who are disabled with chronic illnesses and living in skilled nursing and assisted living facilities in Santa Barbara. At least 55% of them are low income and more than 60% of them have no visitors at all—except for our young volunteers. Quality of life at the end of life depends more on moments of connectedness and meaning than anything else. The AiC program delivers such moments—almost 10,000 of them last year—with such quality and consistency that it produces noticeable improvements in well-being for the frail elderly during their final years of life. The students' weekly visits, and their friendship, bring encouragement, hope, and restore seven core elements of well-being that are fundamental to quality of life. Such meaningful social engagement is just as much a basic need for human flourishing as food, medicine or shelter. Adventures in Caring is a win-win program. The undergraduate students who volunteer are pursuing careers in health care. They gain emotional intelligence, advanced listening skills, and a greater capacity for compassion by being of service to the frail elderly. This is how our future doctors and nurses learn that how we treat people is just as important as what we treat them with. The skill set, this language of healing, stays with them for life. It benefits every patient in their care for the rest of their career. The skills are sufficiently robust that they are passed on from generation to generation. Former volunteers, now in mid-career, teach these competencies in compassion to their own students. History and accomplishments. The Adventures in Caring has served Santa Barbara County for thirty-five years. Through our volunteer internship program we have provided more than one million personal visits to isolated patients in hospitals and nursing homes—so that those who are facing the challenge of a serious illness or injury do not have to face it alone. President George H.W. Bush recognized these efforts in 1991 with his Point of Light Award for outstanding community service—the first such award given to any organization in the Tri-Counties. Thirty-five years of pioneering work in the human side of health care has also produced proven methods of teaching volunteers and staff how to communicate with compassion. We have shared these discoveries in a best-selling video and book, Communicating with Compassion, which is now used by thousands of nonprofit organizations throughout the country. In 2004 we were awarded the International Health & Medical Media Award for best media production in patient care, for our educational video, The Medicine of Compassion.