EAST LONGMEADOW — Change is coming to the Pleasant View Senior Center.
Executive Director Erin Koebler is departing for a new position as director of case management with Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital in Ludlow. And though Koebler told Reminder Publishing she is excited about this new opportunity, she is also sad to be leaving the center that has been her home for the past four years. Her last day at the center will be April 30.
“This was certainly the most difficult job transition decision I’ve ever made because I love Pleasant View so much,” Koebler said. “I wasn’t planning on moving on — it wasn’t part of the great scheme of things — but an opportunity landed, and I explored it.”
Koebler explained that, as a licensed social worker, the move to Encompass is taking her back to her roots.
“I began my work with older adults in case management,” she shared, adding that that experience has spanned the gamut from community work to guardianships to private case management.
She added the Ludlow facility was where she sent her father when he needed rehab services, and that Encompass has been the place she’s recommended to Senior Center members who were exploring rehab options when facing upcoming hospitalizations.
“I really believe in the mission of Encompass Health,” Koebler said.
But that belief hasn’t made her decision to leave Pleasant View and the East Longmeadow elders she serves there an easy one.
“I’ve been there almost four years. In some sense, it seems longer and in some ways, I think back and it feels like a month. In other ways it feels like it’s been my home forever,” Koebler shared.
Koebler said that she joined the center as it was opening up just after the COVID-19 shutdown, and attendance was only about 78 people a day. Now the center regularly serves “double that number, it’s a busy, active place,” she said.
When asked what programs she was most proud of having brought to East Longmeadow during her tenure, Koebler was quick to point out the town’s age and dementia- friendly certification and the Senior Center’s podcast — “Stories from the View” — a weekly program that a dedicated group from the center has been producing since October 2022.
“We did a lot of work with the community to achieve [age and dementia-friendly] community certification,” Koebler explained. The podcast is high on her list of achievements as well because the program allows the center to focus on — and preserve — stories of people in the community.
She also noted the newest program that Pleasant View has instituted – using text messaging to communicate with members.
“I’m really proud that we are one of the first senior centers in the area, and also in the nation, using texting to communicate with people in the community,” Koebler said. The program, she went on to explain, “allows us to text people in their native language and answer them in their native language. It allows us to connect with people who don’t want to make phone calls but have a question [they need answered].”
Koebler is also leaving the center with some financial pluses, having been instrumental in establishing fee-for-service programs at Pleasant View that helps supplement the center’s budget. Through these programs, Pleasant View provides meals to Quarry Hill and Village Green housing units in East Longmeadow and also provides transportation to a Birchland Park Middle School student “at a smaller fee than other transport providers, and in a more individualized way,” Koebler said.
The meal program contract — which provides a congregate meal as well as Meals on Wheels services to the two senior housing properties — is funded by a federal grant administered by Greater Springfield Senior Services, Inc., Koebler said.
The center also recently established a Friends of the East Longmeadow Council on Aging group, which can act as a 501c3 nonprofit fundraising group for Pleasant View. Koebler said by adjusting the bylaws of what originally was a social club, the group will now be eligible to apply for grants that the Senior Center, as part of a municipality, cannot.
“We’ve looked at ways of diversified funding knowing that grants don’t last, and we want to take the burden off the local taxpayer while also realizing our senior population has grown and we have to find ways to supplement funding to sustain our programs,” Koebler said of these fiscal initiatives.
But overall, Koebler is most proud of the atmosphere she’s tried to create and will be leaving, at Pleasant View.
“I hope that me and my team have really created a culture of a welcoming center that brings people back,” Koebler said. “I want them to have a reason to come and I want them to feel comfortable coming here, it’s hard to make friends after a certain age, and I want people to feel welcome.”
“I just love that this is a welcoming culture,” Koebler continued. “People come in all the time ant tell us that this is the friendliest Senior Center, and that’s who we really want to be.”
