News & Blog

CEO Jay Prince to Focus on Ensuring Broadmead’s Strength

By Jackie Mintz

Jay Prince, Broadmead’s CEO as of last month, brings to his new position a background overseeing and strengthening a CCRC similar to Broadmead, where he initiated innovations that, if emulated here, could add new dimensions to this community. Jay understands, however, that he first needs to get to know Broadmead residents and learn about Quaker values and processes. He says he is looking forward to doing this and welcomes opportunities to meet with residents in cluster meetings and other settings.

He has already arranged to be educated about Quaker values. Prior to coming to Broadmead, Jay was CEO for ten years at Heritage Community of Kalamazoo, a non-profit CCRC in Kalamazoo, MI, which had fewer Independent Living (IL) units than Broadmead, but larger licensed care departments. He took that job at a time when Heritage was in financial instability and turned it around by increasing revenue and decreasing operational costs.

Several initiatives that Jay instituted during his time at Heritage include a smart-home technology consulting and service company that was acquired through a joint venture arrangement. It provided a smarthome system for all IL units, including a front door security system, connected lights and thermostats, voice assistants, and electric blinds. In addition, the company had a research center that worked on building physical environments that, with adaptive sensory features, could lower the anxiety of persons with dementia.

Jay also raised the funds to build an education and research center for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, The Memory Care Learning Center, which provides free education and instruction to all caregivers in the Kalamazoo region, most of them family members. The Center also conducts research into immediate quality-of-life issues, as distinguished from scientific research whose results, as important as they are, will not be known for years or even decades.

In addition, Jay acquired a private duty homecare business and integrated it into Heritage. Though comparable to Broadmead’s Friends Connect program, it serves a wider segment of the broader community.

What attracted Jay to the field of eldercare? As he vividly explained at a recent Fireside Chat, he had a life-changing experience during his last year in college, when, as an intern, he spent 24 hours as a patient in a nursing home. There he learned what it was like to have to wait for someone to help him out of bed to go to the bathroom, and to need to be turned every two hours throughout the night. During that evening, he met elderly patients whose life experiences and accomplishments he found so impressive, he decided his calling would be to work to improve the living environments for older adults.