Nursing Home Card Project founded by Geneseo alum

Sedona Orlow (left) and Maria Lye-McElroy (right) writing uplifting cards to nursing home residents.

The Nursing Home Card Project (NHCP) is a charity that works to send handwritten notes to residents in nursing homes who do not regularly receive visitors. The project, started by Geneseo alum Rachel Bennett, has grown steadily since it started in 2020. 

According to the charity’s website, Bennett became concerned with the quality of life for nursing home residents across the country when she saw how unhappy her mother was living in a nursing home. While her mother was living in a nursing home with dementia, Bennett saw how little human interaction the residents received, how infrequently they were able to go outside or leave their rooms, and how few residents saw frequent visitors. 

Bennett said, “My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was 52, when I was in my mid-twenties, and it was one of these crazy difficult chapters in my life where I just saw her decline cognitively. She had been a very vibrant human being. She had been a professor at a community college in upstate New York. She was a very good human and watching that disease take her was just incredibly difficult, because there’s nothing you can do. It has no cure, and inevitably, when she was 58, I had to make a very difficult decision to put her in a nursing home. And I saw the loneliness that she and her fellow nursing home residents face daily.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Bennett realized how badly these problems would be amplified by the visiting restrictions. In May 2020, she began sending handwritten cards of encouragement to nursing home residents and encouraged others to do the same via Instagram and Twitter. 

“Then I saw the dire loneliness that nursing home residents were facing in the pandemic when we had to shut the door so literally and we were not allowed to visit them. They were not allowed to leave because they were too vulnerable with their immune systems. I just thought to myself, ‘Oh my god. This is a national tragedy, that our loved ones are dying ill-equipped, uncared for, and lonely.’ And so, I can't change the whole system, but let's at least make some cards.”

According to the charity’s website, the project has grown to include residential nursing homes in New York, California, Mississippi, Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon, and has started similar movements in Scotland, Britain, and Italy. Bennett was also featured as New Yorker of the Week in Aug. 2020 by NY Spectrum News as acknowledgment of her work during the pandemic. 

Bennett’s plans for the future include expanding the reach and size of the NHCP. She hopes to certify her charity as a non-profit organization and hire more employees to be able to provide more services for neglected nursing home residents. If the movement grows in size, the NHCP may become Bennett’s primary occupation, but for now she is still the owner of a theater company and a yoga instructor.

“Ideally, my five-year plan, if wishes could become reality, would include being able to turn my charity into a nonprofit,” she said. “Then I would get to pay myself and pay other employees because everything we do is from our own time. There’s just a lot that I do right now. I would like to start a nonprofit so that there could be some compensation and some staff that could help me with all this because as of now it's really just me.” 

Bennett said that her main motivation to continue her work despite her packed schedule and lack of staff is her compassion for others. She said that she wants to leave behind a legacy of compassion and inspire others to do the same. 

“Compassion is one of my favorite words because when you break it down from the Latin, com means ‘with’ and passio means ‘to suffer.’ So, the word compassion literally means ‘I will suffer with you.’ I will stand with you. I will show up for you and be with you. And that’s compassion,” she said. “The only thing we leave behind when we die is what we have given others.”

Interested prospective volunteers can find more information on the NHCP’s Twitter and Instagram, @nursinghomecardproject.