VILLAGE: a story about caring

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Experience the Village Care story.

 

Want to learn more about the Village Care story

 

and the inspiring tales of individuals who wanted

 

to make a difference in the lives of frail adults

 

and of persons living with HIV/AIDS? And hear

 

from remarkable individuals who have confronted

 

aging and HIV infection?

 

 

Excerpts from the book:

"In the mid-1970's, a small group of residents of Manhattan's West Village faced a crisis: private owners were moving to close the only nursing home serving much of the west side of the borough....What follows in this book is the story of how this small group of people created a movement that reached all the way to the White House..."

 

 

"It wasn’t a job, it was a social commitment, a life commitment, a work commitment,” Sister Bonnie said of saving the Village Nursing Home. “It became a big part of our lives, it wasn’t just go to the office and come home."

 

 

"The thing that got me involved in the nursing home was that when the owner of the home decided he wanted to close it up, he wheeled all these people onto the sidewalk, in their wheelchairs,” recalled Ed Gold, a member of Community Board 2 and for more than forty years a writer for The Villager, a local newspaper. “I think he wheeled the people out just to get a reaction from the community"

 

 

“The board of The Village Nursing Home were nice, community people who had come from saving this nursing home as a community resource. That was their mentality. So I think they came from the same place when AIDS struck: men in our community are dying. It’s our community. It’s Greenwich Village. We are proud of our community. We are proud of the gay men in our community.” —Len McNally, architect of the Village Nursing Home’s first three AIDS programs.

 

 

 

"Len [McNally]was integral in forging the organization’s first three AIDS programs: the 20th Street day treatment program, which became a model for other programs throughout the country; the AIDS-specific Certified Home Health Agency (CHHA), the first in New York State; and Rivington House, the first AIDS-only nursing home in the country."