To Steve Lustig, a recently retired UC Berkeley administrator and Free Speech Movement veteran, Ashby Village is a logical next step in a life steeped in community activism and health- and eldercare leadership. A vigorous 66, he’s devoted to finding ways to extend members’ reach to needed services and resources, from negotiating price discounts to bringing new agencies into the village’s network. The main benefit of belonging, thus far, has been the time and energy he invests.
More: Village movement takes root among UC Berkeley’s dynamic elders
“I’m very involved in the community aspect of it,” explains Lustig, who was associate vice chancellor for health and human services when he ended his 26-year campus career. “For me, it’s being engaged with a lot of very smart people, trying to figure out what we want our community to look like as we get older.”
Herb Strauss, 75, an emeritus chemistry professor at Berkeley, joined the group two years ago, prompted by declining health, the logistics of maintaining an active social life off-campus and the need for help with “things around the house that we used to do without thinking.”
Ask him what he’s gotten from Ashby Village, though, and he cites the morning last spring when doctors told him he needed emergency surgery. His wife, exhausted from a day of worrying at the hospital, finally “couldn’t take it anymore,” and found herself alone and anxiously climbing the walls of their Berkeley home. She called executive director Andy Gaines, and before long a couple she’d never met from Ashby Village drove her back to the hospital and waited there with her for several hours, taking her home again once word came that Strauss would be released the next day.
“Sometimes,” he says, “you might just need someone to listen to you.”
Like its sister villages across the country, Ashby Village is a work in progress. Not surprisingly, though, its roots in Berkeley and on campus lend it a distinctly grassroots character. For some, the village offers a second chance — or even a third or fourth — not just to be a part of a vital community as they grow older, but to help create one.
“I think the challenge is to find creative ways to make use of what’s available,” says psychologist Joan Cole, a longtime community organizer who served stints at Berkeley as a postgrad and faculty member. “There are all kinds of obvious things, like transportation or having meals prepared. But I’m interested in using the village in creative ways.”
Cole wasn’t sure what to expect when she and her husband, Bob, joined. What she found was completely unexpected — “a marvelous young woman” to help her frail, 89-year-old husband, who suffers from dementia, complete a memoir. “It felt,” she says, “like a little miracle.”
