Strategic Wellness Plan for a Continuing Care Retirement Community

The Ambiguity

A continuing care retirement community (CCRC) needed to decide where to invest in new physical space and programming to support residents’ wellbeing — but “wellness” meant something different to every group involved. Current residents wanted different things than prospective residents. Frontline staff saw daily friction points that leadership didn’t. And none of it had been systematically compared against what similar, well-regarded communities were actually doing.

The organization needed more than an opinion. It needed a defensible, prioritized set of recommendations for its physical spaces, programming, and outcomes measurement — grounded in evidence, not just the loudest voices in the room.

Approach

I led a mixed-methods research effort designed around a real constraint: this had to be done thoroughly, but on a tight budget and timeline, for a nonprofit senior living organization.

Secondary research established the baseline: demographic trends for the surrounding region, national data on wellness program adoption in CCRCs, and industry benchmarking data on program participation and physical space utilization.

Primary research engaged every stakeholder group with a stake in the outcome:

• Individual interviews with the executive director and staff to understand current operations
• A focus group with internal staff across every functional area (maintenance, clinical, dining, marketing, finance) to surface operational friction points
• A separate focus group with external community stakeholders (healthcare, legal, financial, and aging-services organizations) for outside perspective
• A town-hall-style meeting with current residents, using a dot-voting exercise so residents could prioritize a long list of ideas without requiring one-on-one interviews for each of the 77 attendees — a deliberate design choice to get rigorous, quantifiable prioritization data within budget
• A separate focus group with prospective residents, since their priorities turned out to be meaningfully different from current residents’
• Site visits to three well-regarded senior living communities, to benchmark physical space design and program delivery against organizations further along the same path

Throughout, I applied Lawton’s ecological model of aging as the conceptual backbone: the idea that wellbeing depends on the fit between a person’s functional capacity and the demands of their environment. That framework shaped which questions I asked and which space and program recommendations I prioritized — for example, treating physical accessibility and “right-sizing” of spaces to ability level as a first-order design constraint, not an afterthought.

What I Found

Patterns emerged that no single stakeholder group could have surfaced alone:

• Communication, not amenities, was residents’ top daily frustration — residents voted “not knowing what’s going on” as their single biggest daily hassle, ahead of physical complaints like limited dining hours.
• Current and prospective residents wanted different things. Current residents were protective of security and community boundaries; prospective residents were more open to shared or revenue-generating spaces. A one-size-fits-all recommendation would have satisfied neither group.
• Comparator site visits surfaced concrete design lessons — for example, a poorly-trafficked café at one benchmark community turned out to be a function of layout and location relative to the fitness center, not the concept itself, directly informing where we recommended placing a similar amenity.
• Existing programs were failing for a structural reason, not a demand reason. Several activities (art, exercise classes) had strong resident interest on paper but weak attendance once paid instructional leadership was removed — a findings pattern that reframed the fix from “add more programs” to “resource the programs you have.”

What Changed

The research produced nine priority growth areas, each with a specific goal and concrete strategies — spanning physical space additions (a centralized fitness/wellness center, a redesigned dining and social hub), program changes (restructuring how volunteer and educational opportunities were organized), and organizational changes (establishing standardized outcomes measurement for wellness programming, which hadn’t existed before this project).

The recommendations were delivered to organizational leadership as a strategic planning tool to guide capital investment and programming decisions going forward — giving the organization, for the first time, a prioritized and evidence-backed roadmap instead of a set of competing anecdotal requests.

Note: the linked report has been redacted to protect the client organization’s and individuals’ confidentiality. The research methodology and findings are presented as originally developed.