Wartburg, the Mount Vernon-based eldercare facility, has received a $25,000 endowment from former board member Dr. Wally Borgen.
Borgen first learned about Wartburg in 1965 while she was studying at Concordia College in Bronxville.
“I was in an all-girls singing group, there were six of us and I brought them down to the Wartburg and we did a concert,” Borgen recalled, noting that at the time the facility was both a retirement home and an orphanage that offered a unique arrangement where the retirees were partnered with the children as “grandparents,” thus giving both a chance for care and affection that might be hard to come by otherwise, particularly during the holidays.
While state regulations eventually required Wartburg to choose between eldercare and childcare services, Borgen said that the apparent community-oriented approaches and solutions let her know it was a special place from the very beginning.
“When I eventually went back to Concordia to teach as part of the faculty, because Wartburg was literally minutes from campus, I had friends who were residents there. People who retired from Concordia and eventually went there, so I was going back and forth,” Borgen said.
When she started teaching classes on management at Concordia, she also began to give lectures to the residents at Wartburg, which allowed her to see that the community was hungry for educational opportunities, including her former professors who appreciated the opportunity to stay abreast of the latest developments in their fields. That sense of community and the chance to contribute led Borgen to serve on Wartburg’s board for 10 years.
However, Borgen has more than just a board member’s perspective – she also has a short-term resident’s perspective. Several years ago, she had knee surgery while teaching at Concordia, and her family was on the West Coast.
“I did it over the Christmas holiday because I had six weeks off of school,” she said. “I couldn’t go home, so I said I’ll go to Wartburg and do my short term there. I arrived on a Friday evening, and nobody knew who I was – they didn’t know I was a board member at the time.”
“I spent the first three days there until the chairman of the board came in to see how I was doing,” she added, allowing there may have been some who were tipped off because she “went around saying, ‘So tell me, how do you like working here at the Wartburg?’ It was kind of like ‘Undercover Boss’ – it was really interesting because I got a lot of feedback from people. They were very supportive and really enjoy it.”
Those employees are also the focus of the endowment, which Borgen said will be set up as a continuing endowment to provide educational opportunities to Wartburg employees every year. The hope is to help them develop both professionally, and as members of the community.
“Let’s say a nurse’s aide is interested in becoming an LPN [Licensed Practical Nurse],” Borgen said. “In order to do that they will need to go back to school and let’s face it, jobs do not pay exactly what they should. So how do you get the money to go back to school when you want to increase your ability to make a difference not only for yourself but for the patients that you serve and for the organization?”
Borgen positioned the new endowment as the answer to that question. The funds will be distributed through an application process instead of the human resources department, and will be available to any current employee at Wartburg.
She also expressed hope that others will feel compelled to contribute either to the endowment she launched or start their own, noting that providing opportunities for employees will help Wartburg help attract and retain the top talent that keeps the community vital.
