Why Scotland Is Opening a Dementia Center in a National Park

Governments and schools are investing in technology to better serve people of different abilities. Innovations include text-to-911 for deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens, robotic telepresence for remote students, and the Vitals app, which allows families and caregivers to alert police officers of ways to help developmentally disabled family members.

Feeding the raccoons in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park was a tourist activity promoted by websites and supported by park vendors selling cat food. When the result was overpopulation of raccoons unafraid of people, steps were taken to protect the raccoons including banning vendors and educating tourists about their impact.

The Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique has repopulated its large mammals by over 700 percent through collaborations between wildlife authorities and nonprofits. With millions of dollars in philanthropic assistance, the park’s revival is made possible by supporting and using local and indigenous knowledge, as well as taking a whole-community approach that provides services for those towns around African national parks. Such philanthropic approaches to conservation are part of a larger, global trend taking place in countries around the world.

Crowdsourcing data allows developers to help those with limited mobility find accessible routes. The AccessMap Seattle project, in collaboration with the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington and OpenStreetMap, has tested and is improving a map where users can find and edit information about the elevation of rotes, sidewalks, and crosswalks to serve those who are challenged with their mobility.

Dementia units and long-term care homes for the elderly are often desolate and lonely places, with harried workers attempting to meet the needs of their patients while also meeting government-set metrics of success. For families and individuals, it can be difficult to imagine a better way. However, a pilot program in Canada called the Butterfly room is showing that dedicated efforts to making long-term care homes a vibrant and loving place for someone's last days has positive impacts for everyone - and is worth a government investment do right across the country.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a New Deal program to build outdoor recreation facilities, creating thousands of jobs during the Great Depression and building iconic state parks. Delaware programs, like the Senior Corps that enlists the help of people over 55, encourage civic engagement modeled after the CCC. Pennsylvania's Outdoor Corps hires young people to restore public lands over the summer. Congress introduced bills to revive CCC-like initiatives that could support rural economies hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, but environmental funding is not a priority of the current administration.

To better serve patients struggling with dementia, a hospital in Berlin established a department of geriatrics and began screening "patients for cognitive impairments upon admission, providing them with trained volunteers for personal support and non-pharmacological interventions to prevent delirium." This course of action has helped the hospital to diagnose cases earlier and offer dementia-specific care for patients, which consequently has reduced the prescribing of drugs for these patients.

A partnership between Minnesota’s state parks and libraries in low-income communities is providing free entry passes to the parks to allow those who could not otherwise afford to visit a chance to do so.

The nonprofit Coombs Outdoors runs summer and winter camps for youth to experience and learn about the outdoors. The camps are in high demand because of the affordable price made possible by donor subsidies.

The Alliance Center for Independence (ACI) started working with people who have disabilities to create better disaster preparedness measures that consider disabilities, ensuring support and shelter are accessible to anyone and everyone. ACI held an overnight shelter simulation exercise that allowed them to practice each step of an emergency shelter response with people who have disabilities to identify any areas that could be improved. These simulations have become a model for other counties across the state, inspiring more shelters to make improvements to their accessibility.