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Senior Planning Services Celebrates Its 20th Year
After providing care for hundreds of clients over the years, a Santa Barbara County-based firm is celebrating its 20th year of operation.
“Senior Planning Services has helped clients throughout the county during the past two decades and shows no signs of slowing down,” owner Suzanne McNeely said. “We have served hundreds of clients, and our business is expanding as children of elderly parents continue to seek our care in order that their parent can stay in their home.
“Having worked as a medical social worker for many years, I had a growing concern for the elderly and disabled who lacked family to advocate for them in often fragmented, impersonal health-care systems. I came to Santa Barbara in 1988 with $7,000 savings and the idea that I would use my knowledge to help people with chronic illness, frailty or developmental disabilities. I put together the services they needed to assure their quality of life, safety and dignity.”
McNeely said her experience with nonprofits, insurance and public programs convinced her the only way she would be able see that needs were addressed, in a comprehensive and coordinated fashion, was to offer herself as a privately hired professional without the limits of those environments and funding sources.
“I hoped eventually to find five or six clients who I could serve one-on-one,” she said. “I believed that I could use my broad base of experience and knowledge to serve as the fulcrum for communication between their health-care providers and legal and financial advisers.”
Beginning with a rotary telephone on a child’s desk in the extra bedroom of her home, McNeely chose the name Senior Planning Services and went to work for St. Francis Medical Center and the Visiting Nurses Association so that she might support herself and get to know the community as quickly as possible. “Every free moment I networked and spread the word that I was available as a ‘rent-a-daughter,’” she said.
McNeely began to hire other professionals including nurses, paralegals, psychiatric specialists and therapists.
As the expertise of the organization grew, area courts began to ask McNeely to step in to serve as conservator or trustee for elders who had no one to help them in the face of incapacity or when family conflict required a neutral, knowledgeable third party.
Even though McNeely’s firm became widely recognized in the community, Senior Planning Services struggled with the public assumption that they were a social service agency and therefore should not charge for services or that there should be a source of public funding that did not exist.
“We made it by the skin of our teeth, never missing a payroll or a late payment on a bill, often working 60 hours a week to assure we made enough money to continue the work we all loved,” she said.
Fulfilling a longtime dream, the company bought a commercial building at 1811 State St. in 2006. McNeeley likes to say “we’re doing well by doing good,” and her 20 years of service bears this out.
— Barbara Burger is a publicist.
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