YouthCare

There are an estimated 6.2 million Americans diagnosed with depression because they provide unpaid care for a person with dementia. This number is projected to double in the next 11 years, with the cost of care expected to bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid. 

The Youth Movement Against Alzheimer’s offers a novel, inexpensive solution: YouthCare, an intergenerational respite-care program that partners trained student volunteers and older adults with early-stage dementia in a community-based setting. For three hours, twice a week, student-senior pairs play games, participate in artistic activities, and deliver the research-backed Brain Boot Camp to help address cognitive decline. 

If YouthCare reaches 1% of Americans with dementia and allows them to age at home for just 2 more months, we will save the healthcare system 1 billion dollars.

Alzheimer’s disease causes a devastating emotional and stressful burden on family caregivers. This burden can be especially difficult for the 34% of these caregivers who are aged 65 and older, and the 25% who care for both an aging parent and a child under the age of 18.

Given that almost half of these caregivers have a household income less than $50,000, much of the financial responsibility gets transferred to Medicare and Medicaid, further weighing down our healthcare system. Due to the combined emotional, physical, and financial stress, 40% of family caregivers will go on to develop some form of depression.

Caregiver respite is incredibly important to maintain the health and wellbeing of the spouses and families of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. Unfortunately, those who seek the help of paid caregivers to obtain respite from the tough lifestyle find a market that offers services at a cost too expensive for them to afford.

The proposed program will maintain a target population of unpaid family caregivers in SPAs four and six of LA County who are currently caring for a PWD and cannot afford respite care services. This population is in high need of our service and is proximally located to USC, the source of our students volunteers. This model is a win-win-win situation for caregivers, students, and seniors with Alzheimer’s. Caregivers: we significantly reduce their stress (which leads to depression) and empower them to provide better care. Students: we provide them hands-on volunteer experience and career mentorship (based on the patient they are partnered with). Seniors with Alzheimer's: we bring light back into their lives through youthful partnership. Our program will also be a memory care program as we have gotten a license from the UCLA Longevity Center to train all of our students to use Brain Boot Camp techniques with their senior partners.

The YMAA offers a novel, inexpensive solution: YouthCare, an intergenerational respite-care program that partners trained college student volunteers and older adults with early-stage dementia. For 3 hours, twice a week, they play games, participate in artistic activities, and deliver the research-backed Brain Boot Camp, developed by the UCLA Longevity Center to help people compensate for age-related cognitive decline. Students and seniors are paired based on similar interests, fostering a valuable mentor-mentee relationship.

YouthCare is built on a grant-funded model developed in partnership with UCLA Geriatrics. This program has paired over 125 students and seniors, providing more than 3200 hours of respite care. Our caregiver waitlist was at more than 4 times capacity, 100% of students reported that they would recommend this program to a friend, and many seniors with Alzheimer’s provided anecdotal evidence that they had found purpose once again in their lives. We launched our pilot YouthCare program at USC in February 2018. 

YouthCare is the lowest-cost respite care option on the market, and presents a unique opportunity for caregivers to reduce their stress, seniors to seek purposeful aging, and students to engage with our growing elderly population. YouthCare transcends the conventional respite care programs by seamlessly integrating memory care and partnering students and seniors using mobile technology. This intergenerational path for volunteer respite also fosters a mentor-mentee rapport that helps reinvigorates seniors. YouthCare is a win-win-win solution for older adults, caregivers, and students. Our nonprofit is uniquely aligned to bring this expansion to care access because no other for-profit care company can match our cost and no other traditional Alzheimer’s nonprofit has our reach to the younger demographic.

YouthCare is the lowest-cost respite care option on the market, and presents a unique opportunity for caregivers to reduce their stress, seniors to seek purposeful aging, and students to engage with our growing elderly population. YouthCare transcends the conventional respite care programs as memory care is seamlessly integrated into our caregiving curriculum. This intergenerational path for volunteer respite also fosters a mentor-mentee rapport that helps reinvigorates seniors. Furthermore, by cutting back caregiving costs, YouthCare will save costs for the healthcare system, making it a win-win-win-win solution for older adults, caregivers, students, and the healthcare system. Our nonprofit is uniquely aligned to bring this expansion to care access because no other for-profit care company can match our cost and no other traditional Alzheimer’s nonprofit has our reach to the younger demographic.

 Our human-centric mobile app also makes YouthCare unique because it creates a personalized experience and reduces operational costs. The mobile application offers a dual profile approach that allows students to showcase their personalities and interests, and caregivers to explain the career path and hobbies of their loved ones. The algorithm then partners students with seniors based on similar career interests, and hobbies. Our mobile application is critical in eliminating a need for site-administrators thus significantly lowering our cost-to-client.

Mobile application

Theory of Change

An answer

By the end of 2018, we aim to complete a MVP of our mobile app and will conduct user-testing. Also, we plan to apply to become a Medicaid waiver program and work with private/Medicare-advantage insurance plans to push costs from end-user to health insurance. 

In 12 months, we aim to launch 5 more YouthCare sites that will reach 150 more caregivers and 150 more students. In the next 3 years, we expect 50 new sites in primarily urban/suburban areas, helping us serve 1000 caregivers and 1000 students. 

In 5 years we plan to transform access to care by onboarding 250 universities and actively serving over 6000 caregivers. We believe we can scale rapidly because our app will simplify the process to start new sites. Expanding our training protocol to include other diseases will enable us to also service those affected by other diseases that require family caregivers. Finally, we plan to explore the potential for direct-to-home care, which will allow us to offer services for an even lower cost.

During all of our pitch competitions, we’ve had several judges question student interest in such a program. We have focused our marketing efforts and strategy to best reach students, and it seems our efforts have paid off. In just the few two weeks of launching our program, we had 40 students apply. 

Another barrier to success involves attracting caregiver clients. Even though we had several referral partners for our program, we were only able to serve six caregiver at our community-based venue this past year. In parallel, we did 122 one-on-one surveys with family caregivers near USC last year. Through these surveys, we surmised that caregivers of this socioeconomic status struggled to transport their PWDs to our site. 

A final barrier to success is management of liability of students in the homes of PWDs. 

Having completed a grant-funded pilot, TimeOut@UCLA, for two years and venue-based YouthCare for one year, we believe we have identified our core barriers to success. An in-home social enterprise is anticipated to be radically more successful.

We are transitioning our model to serve family caregivers in-home, rather than at a community-based venue. This transition also serves to address issues of cultural stigma that communities of color face in seeking caregiving help and lowers our operating cost for the program. 

We are working with professors at both UCLA and USC to develop or license a training that is more robust to prepare students for providing respite care in homes. In addition, we are funding student background checks and expanding our liability coverage to mitigate these concerns for family caregivers and future partner universities, respectively. 

• CEO: Nihal Satyadev, graduate of University of Redlands and George Washington University

• COO: Harrison Ma, graduate of UC Berkeley

• Director of Marketing: Alissa Anderegg, graduate of Northwestern and Duke

• Director of National Relations: Kathy Rose, graduate of UCLA

• Director of Development: Lourdes Bustamante, student at USC

• Director of National Outreach: Sharanya Suresh, student at USC

• Director of Public Policy: Shyam Hassan, masters student at USC

In 2015, Nihal recognized that Alzheimer's disease will bankrupt medicaid and medicare within two decades. Noticing a lack of youth advocacy on this issue, he founded The Youth Movement Against Alzheimer’s (YMAA) - 501(c)3. In the 4 years of his involvement as CEO, YMAA has become the nation's widest-reaching nonprofit in providing opportunities for college and high school students to advocate, research, and provide care for those battling with the disease. YMAA has expanded to 19 high schools and colleges, provided over 4500 hours of caregiver respite, and raised $10,000 for research scholarships. More recently, he has begun spearheading a statewide campaign in California to start the first-ever "AmeriCorps for caregiving" program to help expand respite care access for family caregivers. Nihal's work has been recognized by TEDMED and the Milken Institute. He was recently awarded as the youngest Under 40 Senior Living Leader at the age of 22. Nihal holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Redlands and a Masters in Public Health from George Washington University. 

YMAA currently has $60,000 in funding allocated for YouthCare. This funding has been acquired from several pitch competitions, a LA2050 grant, and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation. Our three most recent funding sources are a $5,000 planning grant from the Eisner Foundation, $15,000 from the George Washington University New Venture Competition, and $10,000 from LA2050’s grant under the “live” category.

It is important to note that we will be using funds from the Eisner Foundation to do market research on family caregivers in SPAs four and six such that if we receive funds from the Rupe Foundation, we will be able to most effectively use them to target our clients and implement the program.

The major partners of our pilot are currently the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, with whom we provide our pool of students, the UCLA Longevity Center, with whom we collaborated with to create a memory care program that can be delivered by undergraduates, and several local health entities that provide caregiver referrals (LA Caregiver Resource Center, Alzheimer’s Greater LA, First AME Church, Kaiser Permanente, Partners in Care Foundation, Cedars Sinai).

Our social enterprise’s main revenue stream is the $15 per hour rate for our caregiving service. The revenue generated will provide us enough funds to create a 17% profit margin.

A majority of funding for YouthCare has been raised through pitch competitions. We’ve won funding through competitions at UCLA, Social Venture Partners, and OpenIDEO’s international care for dementia challenge. We have also had a successful crowdfunding campaign through the Clinton Global Initiative platform to raise over $6,500. Most recently, we were recognized as a finalist in LA2050’s challenge and won their honorable mention grant. Our current funds are estimated to create a 1.5-year runway.

Strategy for increasing revenue includes temporarily offering free care to grow our customer database, subsidizing costs through partnerships with larger nonprofits, and eventually partnering with independent physician associations, managed care organizations, and Medicaid to circumvent out-of-pocket payments. Implementation of our mobile application will be able to lower our cost to client to $10/hour.

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