Keeping senior living board members aligned can be challenging in this age of competing priorities. Many boards struggle with fragmentation, uneven engagement, or unfocused conversations, even as organizational leaders face unprecedented challenges. During this session, you’ll learn how to build a more effective board by designing meetings that surface the right insights, promote shared understanding, and encourage strategic questions. Discover how to reinforce the board’s strategic focus between meetings, frame discussions during meetings, and avoid having to reset the conversation every quarter. Here’s your chance to get everyone on the same page—and keep them there—as your organization’s operating landscape evolves.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Many senior living organizations are counting on it. This session will feature an organization that used visual storytelling to attract a new market segment to its senior housing options and to build support for a campus expansion among current residents. Presenters will explain what visual storytelling entails, how it drives effective marketing, and how to assess the appropriate use of AI-generated imagery, architectural renderings, and video flythroughs. You’ll gain practical guidance on effective visual storytelling methods and a candid assessment of approaches that fall short.

Do Medicaid payment levels affect quality and influence racial and ethnic disparities in individual nursing homes? This session will present findings from recent research on this previously unexplored question. Presenters will describe their analysis of a new national database containing facility- and resident-level data for nearly 9,500 nursing homes across 44 states. They’ll share findings on racial and ethnic disparities in nursing home quality and outcomes and examine whether these disparities are associated with Medicaid payment levels. Discover how Medicaid reimbursement shapes the association between a nursing home’s racial and ethnic composition, 5-star quality ratings, staffing levels, and resident-level quality outcomes.

Most home and community-based service (HCBS) agencies cite regulation, staffing, and the growth of managed care as their primary obstacles to growth. While these issues are real, this session will show that most obstacles to HCBS growth, quality, and financial success are internal rather than external. Representatives of a life plan community’s HCBS subsidiary will share highlights from their decade of experience helping senior living communities develop and operate home care, home health, and hospice services. You’ll gain insights into the pitfalls senior living organizations encounter when starting and operating HCBS agencies and take home practical, proactive, and remedial strategies to optimize your operations.

Executive teams update their strategic plans annually to refine the traditional continuum model they’ve offered for decades. These organizations now face unprecedented challenges as more for-profit developers enter the field, consumer preferences shift, and government payments decline. Tweaking the continuum won’t be enough to secure the future. Instead, this session will show you how to restructure your organization and reimagine the continuum. Presenters will offer guidance on selling or repurposing assets to advance your mission, collaborating with and learning from investors, restructuring your debt, and addressing your legal issues. Let a turnaround manager and an investment banker help you develop an achievable restructuring plan that will appeal to investors and secure your organization’s future.

Many life plan communities implement robust wellness programs to help residents live independently longer and extend their healthspan. Yet these communities often overlook less visible but equally influential factors that affect residents’ long-term independence. This session will showcase a life plan community that uses data-driven, behaviorally informed methods to assess residents’ strengths and vulnerabilities, help residents interpret their assessment results, educate them about issues affecting independence, and enable them to co-design targeted interventions. Learn how to make data-informed programming decisions that meet residents’ needs, support independence, and align with organizational strategies to help residents live independently longer.

Educators, providers, policymakers, and workforce leaders nationwide are rethinking how aging services providers recruit, train, support, and retain frontline caregivers. This session will highlight this collaborative effort. Presenters will describe a recent national meeting that examined the potential for multi-state collaboration to standardize certified nursing assistant (CNA) career pathways through state-based Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Programs. They’ll share lessons learned from convening stakeholders across education, workforce development, aging services, finance, policy, and care delivery systems to discuss workforce solutions. You’ll discover how stakeholder collaboration can drive system-wide changes in policy, practice, and workforce development.

Are you struggling to meet the complex medical and social needs of residents in your standalone affordable housing community? The Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) may offer a solution. PACE enables older adults to age safely in the community by providing comprehensive medical care, social services, and care coordination. During this session, you’ll hear from On Lok, which founded the PACE model, and from On Lok PACEpartners, which guides housing providers interested in launching and scaling their own PACE programs. Presenters will explain the PACE approach and its benefits for housing residents. They’ll also outline strategies for co-locating PACE with housing and share a framework to help you begin your PACE exploration.

Does your senior living community have dark interiors, underutilized spaces, and outdated dining areas? It may be time to reimagine your community to make it more appealing to consumers seeking modern design, diverse dining options, and vibrant spaces that foster social engagement. This session will show you how to keep pace with new developments by evaluating your campus space, identifying underused areas, and repurposing them to align with emerging trends and resident expectations. Presenters will share tips for taking a phased renovation approach that lets you exercise your imagination, maximize existing assets, and avoid significant debt. They’ll also offer tools to engage residents in the design process and turn them into project champions.

When team members see a future for themselves at your organization, they will stay, grow, and thrive. This session will show you how in-house career coaching makes that possible by establishing clear career pathways, building trust-based coaching relationships, and supporting skill development. Presenters will outline a scalable career-coaching model used by a life plan community to foster workforce engagement, increase retention, and improve organizational culture. You’ll gain tools to build your own coaching program, including strategies for identifying champions, defining success metrics, and embedding coaching into everyday workflows. Don’t miss this opportunity to create a future where every team member thrives.

How can affordable housing providers help older residents age well in the community? This session will introduce the Residents Engaging in Authentic Conversations on Health (REACH) interview tool, which helps staff in affordable housing communities collect residents’ health and wellness information and use it to connect residents to appropriate services. Eaton Senior Communities in Lakewood, CO, developed the tool with researchers at the University of Denver and is now analyzing and sharing 10 years of resident wellness data with housing providers, healthcare programs, and payers. This session will examine the project’s implementation, early results, and best practices for promoting healthy, affordable aging.

Investing in quality can future-proof your aging services organization against regulatory, reimbursement, and demographic changes. The reason is simple: Discerning consumers assess providers based on whether their quality is trustworthy and measurable. This session will highlight the quality metrics that matter most to consumers and families when selecting aging services providers. You’ll learn how to use a standardized quality framework to strengthen workforce culture, improve recruitment, and reduce turnover. You’ll also discover how your organization’s quality performance can set it apart in the marketplace, build robust referral pipelines, and expand partnerships. This is your chance to transform quality from a compliance requirement into a growth strategy.

It’s no secret that the next generation of older adults seeks flexibility, lifestyle, and choice. Satellite campuses—smaller, independent-living-focused communities near a flagship campus—can help life plan communities meet these preferences and expand into desirable markets without building an on-site continuum of care. This session will explore the satellite campus trend, explain the strategic rationale for satellite developments, and assess their benefits and risks. Presenters will outline steps for evaluating satellite locations and assessing a project’s feasibility and market demand. You’ll learn how to leverage your organization’s brand, culture, and expertise across multiple sites, potentially opening new pathways to growth, revenue diversification, and enhanced market positioning.

Dementia ranks among the most feared chronic conditions of later life. Yet emerging evidence suggests that up to 45% of dementia cases worldwide could be delayed or prevented by addressing its root causes. This session will focus on a Cognitive Wellness Clinic embedded in a senior living community specializing in dementia care. Presenters will describe how the clinic conducts early cognitive wellness assessments and provides clients with personalized recommendations to modify dementia-related risk factors and adopt lifestyle strategies that build confidence, engagement, and well-being. You’ll gain practical strategies for adapting this model within your organization and positioning aging services providers at the forefront of brain health innovation.

When Baby Boomers and members of Gen X arrive at your community’s dining venue, they’ll likely bring new expectations to the table. How will you measure up? This session will report on consumer preferences for culinary programs that deliver flavor, cultural relevance, agency, and a sense of community connection. Presenters will help you meet those preferences with a new culinary framework pioneered by the International Council on Active Aging’s Culinary, Nutrition & Hospitality Network. You’ll learn to reframe senior living dining venues as strategic wellness engines that support physical health, cognitive vitality, and social connection. Get the support you need to rethink how food environments can foster purpose, engagement, and wellness for today’s older adults.

The Transitional Care Model (TCM) is an evidence-based intervention that reduces rehospitalizations and prevents recurring nursing home admissions among high-risk older adults. This session will explain how a life plan community adapted TCM to support residents’ transitions to long-term care. Presenters will describe the community’s transition team, which identifies residents who meet transition requirements and delivers a customized experience through time-sensitive touchpoints and care conferences with residents and their families. They will explain how the process prevents confusion, unclear expectations, care disruptions, and poor outcomes. Learn how TCM can improve care transitions in your life plan community, enrich the resident and family experience, and enhance communication across care levels.

Studying the characteristics of senior living communities with healthy organizational cultures can help providers shape thriving workplaces of their own. This session will showcase how a two-year workforce-strengthening initiative at San Francisco’s Sequoia Living reduced turnover and enhanced resident satisfaction. Presenters will detail how the initiative encouraged residents and team members to embrace a growth mindset that respectfully challenges the status quo, foster an inclusive environment where all voices are heard, and exercise accountability and care to increase engagement and outcomes. You’ll discover how the initiative reduced Sequoia Living’s turnover to an all-time low of 17% and improved the “culture score” the organization receives from its employees.

Most of us are familiar with “co-ops,” multi-unit residential buildings collectively owned and democratically managed by their occupants. This session will examine how a nonprofit senior living organization adopted this commercial real estate model to empower “resident members” of its housing communities to govern themselves. Leaders of the organization will explain how residents participate in decision-making through councils and committees and volunteer to assist with or lead day-to-day operations in collaboration with the property manager. You’ll take home a structured outline of the cooperative housing management model and a new understanding of how this level of active participation helps resident members take pride in their housing and lead healthier, more enriched lives.

Strong leaders persuade, anticipate the future, and guide their organizations toward results. Strong “servant leaders” also build and nurture trust, deepen relationships, and develop team members so they can make a lasting impact. This session will feature servant leaders working to improve the field of aging services and the lives of older adults. Panelists will describe their involvement in a variety of movements, including dementia inclusion, LGBTQ+ affordable housing, and age-friendly cities. They’ll share how they apply their talents and wisdom to promote equity, access, and inclusion within and beyond their organizations. Join this session for a dose of inspiration and leave feeling motivated to consider your own mission and legacy.

Does your life plan community have small studio apartments that it’s struggling to fill because they can’t be expanded or combined with larger units? This session may offer some solutions. A chief marketing officer, an interior designer, and a senior living advisor will share how they successfully marketed and quickly filled five studio apartments that had been sitting empty or used for storage. They did so by tapping into the current interest in stylish, functional tiny-home residences and giving the units a facelift with updated designs and size-appropriate furnishings. You’ll see before-and-after photos showing how the community redesigned and marketed the studio apartments as part of its successful “Tiny Home, Massive Lifestyle” campaign.

As assisted living continues to grow, person-centered approaches to measuring its quality remain scarce. This session will explore how Minnesota addressed this gap by developing an electronic report card that rates assisted living communities on a 5-star scale, using state inspection data and surveys of residents and family members. Presenters will share key findings from the report card’s 2024 statewide implementation, which captured consumer feedback on autonomy, staff relationships, environment, food, and engagement across the state’s assisted living communities. You’ll review tools for measuring resident quality of life and family satisfaction in assisted living, and learn strategies for integrating person-reported measures into quality improvement.

Today’s older adults are living longer, staying healthier longer, and working longer. This shift is reshaping attitudes toward retirement and creating unprecedented opportunities for retirement communities to reinvent themselves. This session will examine how senior living organizations can support the evolving lifestyles of older adults by expanding services beyond community walls and designing surrounding neighborhoods to meet residents’ needs. Presenters will invite you to imagine how neighborhoods and residential communities might intersect, envision the possibilities for intergenerational or multigenerational environments within and around retirement communities, and consider how mixed-use settings might offer better living environments for today’s older adults. Explore the future of aging—and be prepared to rethink your view of traditional retirement communities.