Francisco’s Story: Why Your Giving Tuesday Gift Matters
Your Giving Tuesday gift helps AgingIN educate, coach, uplift, and empower care professionals. Please use the form below to donate.
For nearly two decades, Francisco has shown up every day for the elders at Porter Hills and the Green House® homes in Michigan. He never planned on becoming the kind of caregiver who changes lives, or the kind who is changed by them… but that’s exactly what happened.
When Francisco first stepped into the Green House homes more than 16 years ago, he didn’t know how to cook. Not even a little. But he did know how to listen, how to laugh, and how to bring kindness into a room. That was enough for one woman elder who became his mentor, his cooking coach, and, in many ways, the spark behind his career.
Every day when Francisco arrived for the second shift, she asked to be helped out of her recliner so she could stand beside him in the kitchen. Together, they planned the evening meal. She’d tell him what pan to grab, how to season the pork chops, which vegetables were hiding in the back. She taught him to cook exactly the way she did and she glowed with pride watching him learn.
And when he returned after a weekend off, she loved teasing him:
“Oh my gosh, the food was terrible this weekend!” What she really meant was: I missed you. I missed doing this together. This wasn’t “caregiving.” This was a relationship. This was purpose for both of them.
Creating Moments That Matter.
Francisco has hundreds of stories like this. Stories of elders who found joy, autonomy, and meaning because caregivers like him saw them as people with full lives and not simply “job tasks” to complete.
There was the elder with Parkinson’s who insisted on going outside every night to water the garden, even if it meant she came inside soaked. Staff worried about safety… until the team reframed the situation through the AgingIN lens: dignity of risk, choice, and honoring purpose.
“If she wants to water the plants, we can go sit outside with her,” Francisco said.
And she did — every night. Soaking wet. Beaming.
There were wheelchair users who proudly held baskets filled with tomatoes they grew themselves. Elders who deadheaded flowers and decorated their rooms with fresh blooms. Many who enjoyed salads more simply because they had picked the cucumbers that morning.
In Green House homes, the smallest moments were the biggest ones. They still are.
A Career Shaped by Being SEEN, and by Seeing Others.
Today, Francisco is a resource Shabazz, a food coordinator, a mentor, an unofficial trainer, and the person people call when they want to learn “the Green House way.” He is the definition of a care professional who leads from the heart and someone who treats the home like a HOME and the elders like cherished family members.
But he didn’t learn this in a traditional model. He learned it through the person-directed philosophy AgingIN teaches, strengthens, and protects.
He learned it because someone invested in him.
Your Support Makes Stories Like Francisco’s Possible.
Your Giving Tuesday gift helps AgingIN educate, coach, uplift, and empower care professionals just like Francisco, people who want to create joy, meaning, and belonging for older adults, but need the tools and support to do it.
Because when you invest in people like him, you transform the daily experience of elders in every care setting, skilled nursing, assisted living, small houses, memory care, PACE, and beyond.
Francisco is our “poster person” not because he’s perfect, but because he is the embodiment of what happens when a care worker is respected, taught, believed in, and given the freedom to make life better for others.
This Giving Tuesday, you can help thousands more care professionals feel that same sense of purpose and confidence — and you can help thousands more elders feel seen, valued, and human.
AgingIN changes lives. Francisco is proof.