Rob Kennedy mingled with about a dozen other people in a community space in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.

The room, decorated with an under-the-sea theme, had a balloon arch decked out with streamers meant to look like jellyfish and a cloud of clear balloons mimicking ocean bubbles.

Kennedy comes to this memory cafe twice a month since being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in his late 50s.

Everyone here has a degree of memory loss or is a caregiver for someone with memory loss.

Attendees colored on worksheets with an underwater theme. They drank coffee and returned to the breakfast bar for seconds on pastries.

A quick round of trivia got everyone’s minds working.

“We start out with just little trivia — many of us cannot answer any of the questions,” Kennedy said with a laugh.

“We all have a good time going around,” he added. “You know, we all try to make it fun.”

The northeastern Pennsylvania memory cafe Kennedy attends is one of more than 600 around the country, according to Dementia Friendly America. The gatherings for people with cognitive impairment and their caregivers are relatively cheap and easy to run — often the only expense is a small rental fee for the space.

As state and local health departments nationwide try to make sense of what the potential loss of $11 billion of federal health funding will mean for the services they can offer their communities, memory cafe organizers believe their work may become even more important.

Losing Memory, and Other Things, Too

Kennedy’s diagnosis led him to retire, ending a decades-long career as a software engineer at the University of Scranton.

He recommends memory cafes to other people with dementia and their families.

“If they’re not coming to a place like this, they’re doing themselves a disservice. You got to get out there and see people that are laughing.”

The memory cafes he attends happen twice a month. They have given him purpose, Kennedy said, and help him cope with negative emotions around his diagnosis.

“I came in and I was miserable,” Kennedy said. “I come in now and it’s like, it’s family, it’s a big, extended family. I get to meet them. I get to meet their partners. I get to meet their children. So, it’s really nice.”

More than 6 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with some form of dementia. The diagnosis can be burdensome on relationships, particularly with family members who are the primary caregivers.

A new report from the Alzheimer’s Association found that 70% of caregivers reported that coordinating care is stressful. Socializing can also become more difficult after diagnosis.

“One thing I have heard again and again from people who come to our memory cafe is ‘all of our friends disappeared,’” said Beth Soltzberg, a social worker at Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Boston, where she directs the Alzheimer’s and related dementia family support program.

The inclusion of caregivers is what distinguishes memory cafes from other programs that serve people with cognitive impairment, like adult day care. Memory cafes don’t offer formal therapies. At a memory cafe, having fun together and being social supports the well-being of participants. And that support is for the patient and their caregiver — because both can experience social isolation and distress after a diagnosis.

A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Public Health indicated that even online memory cafes during the pandemic provided social support for both patients and their family members.

“A memory cafe is a cafe which recognizes that some of the clients here may have cognitive impairment, some may not,” said Jason Karlawish, a geriatrics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the co-director of the Penn Memory Center.

Karlawish regularly recommends memory cafes to his patients, in part because they benefit caregivers as well.

“The caregiver-patient dyad, I find often, has achieved some degree of connection and enjoyment in doing things together,” Karlawish said. “For many, that’s a very gratifying experience, because dementia does reshape relationships.”

“That socialization really does help ease the stress that they feel from being a caregiver,” said Kyra O’Brien, a neurologist who also teaches at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We know that patients have better quality of life when their caregivers are under less stress.”

An Affordable Way To Address a Growing Problem

As the population grows older, the number of available family caregivers is decreasing, according to the AARP Public Policy Institute. The report found that the number of potential caregivers for an individual 80 or older will decrease significantly by 2050.

In 2024, the Alzheimer’s Association issued a report projecting a jump in dementia cases in the U.S. from an estimated 6.9 million people age 65 or older currently living with Alzheimer’s disease to 13.8 million people by 2060. It attributed this increase primarily to the aging of the baby boom generation, or those born between 1946 and 1964.

As cases of memory loss are projected to rise, the Trump administration is attempting to cut billions in health spending. Since memory cafes don’t rely on federal dollars, they may become an even more important part of the continuum of care for people with memory loss and their loved ones.

“We’re fighting off some pretty significant Medicaid cuts at the congressional level,” said Georgia Goodman, director of Medicaid policy for LeadingAge, a national nonprofit network of services for people as they age. “Medicaid is a program that doesn’t necessarily pay for memory cafes, but thinking about ensuring that the long-term care continuum and the funding mechanisms that support it are robust and remain available for folks is going to be key.”

The nonprofit MemoryLane Care Services operates two memory cafes in Toledo, Ohio. They’re virtually free to operate, because they take place in venues that don’t require payment, according to Salli Bollin, the executive director.

“That really helps from a cost standpoint, from a funding standpoint,” Bollin said.

One of the memory cafes takes place once a month at a local coffee shop. The other meets at the Toledo Museum of Art. MemoryLane Care Services provides the museum employees with training in dementia sensitivity so they can lead tours for the memory cafe participants.

The memory cafe that Rob Kennedy attends in Pennsylvania costs about $150 a month to run, according to the host organization, The Gathering Place.

“This is a labor of love,” said board member Paula Baillie, referring to the volunteers who run the memory cafe. “The fact that they’re giving up time — they recognize that this is important.”

The monthly budget goes toward crafts, books, coffee, snacks, and some utilities for the two-hour meetings. Local foundations provide grants that help cover those costs.

Even though memory cafes are inexpensive and not dependent on federal funding, they could face indirect obstacles because of the Trump administration’s recent funding cuts.

Organizers worry the loss of federal funds could negatively affect the host institutions, such as libraries and other community spaces.

Memory Cafe Hot Spot: Wisconsin

At least 39 states have hosted memory cafes recently, according to Dementia Friendly America. Wisconsin has the most — more than 100.

The state has a strong infrastructure focused on memory care, which should keep its memory cafes running regardless of what is happening at the federal level, according to Susan McFadden, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She co-founded the Fox Valley Memory Project, which oversees 14 memory cafes.

“They’ve operated on the grassroots, they’ve operated on pretty small budgets and a lot of goodwill,” she said.

Since 2013, Wisconsin has also had a unique network for dementia care, with state-funded dementia care specialists for each county and federally recognized tribe in Wisconsin. The specialists help connect individuals with cognitive impairment to community resources, bolstering memory cafe attendance.

McFadden first heard about memory cafes in 2011, before they were popular in the United States. She was conducting research on memory and teaching courses on aging.

McFadden reached out to memory cafes in the United Kingdom, where the model was already popular and well connected. Memory cafe organizers invited her to visit and observe them in person, so she planned a trip overseas with her husband.

Their tour skipped over the typical tourist hot spots, taking them to more humble settings.

“We saw church basements and senior center dining rooms and assisted living dining rooms,” she said. “That, to me, is really the core of memory cafes. It’s hospitality. It’s reaching out to people you don’t know and welcoming them, and that’s what they did for us.”

After her trip, McFadden started applying for grants and scouting locations that could host memory cafes in Wisconsin.

She opened her first one in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 2012, just over a year after her transformative trip to the U.K.

These days, she points interested people to a national directory of memory cafes hosted by Dementia Friendly America. The organization’s Memory Cafe Alliance also offers training modules — developed by McFadden and her colleague Anne Basting — to help people establish cafes in their own communities, wherever they are.

“They’re not so hard to set up; they’re not expensive,” McFadden said. “It doesn’t require an act of the legislature to do a memory cafe. It takes community engagement.”

This article is part of a partnership with NPR and WVIA.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The post As Federal Health Grants Shrink, Memory Cafes Help Dementia Patients and Their Caregivers appeared first on kffhealthnews.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content focuses on community health and social support programs for individuals with dementia, highlighting concerns about federal funding cuts under the Trump administration, which is a Republican-led government. The article advocates for social programs and notes the potential negative impact of reduced funding on vulnerable populations, aligning it moderately with center-left perspectives that prioritize government-supported social services while maintaining a generally neutral and informative tone.

Esther Bejarano’s son was 11 months old when asthma landed him in the hospital. She didn’t know what had triggered his symptoms — neither she nor her husband had asthma — but she suspected it was the pesticides sprayed on the agricultural fields near her family’s home.

Pesticides are a known contributor to asthma and are commonly used where Bejarano lives in California’s Imperial Valley, a landlocked region that straddles two counties on the U.S.-Mexico border and is one of the main producers of the nation’s winter crops. It also has some of the worst air pollution in the nation and one of the highest rates of childhood asthma emergency room visits in the state, according to data collected by the California Department of Public Health.

Bejarano has since learned to manage her now-19-year-old son’s asthma and works at Comite Civico del Valle, a local rights organization focused on environmental justice in the Imperial Valley. The organization trains health care workers to educate patients on proper asthma management, enabling them to avoid hospitalization and eliminate triggers at home. The course is so popular that there’s a waiting list, Bejarano said.

But the group’s Asthma Management Academy program and similar initiatives nationwide face extinction with the Trump administration’s mass layoffs, grant cancellations, and proposed budget cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Asthma experts fear the cumulative impact of the reductions could result in more ER visits and deaths, particularly for children and people in low-income communities — populations disproportionately vulnerable to the disease.

“Asthma is a preventive condition,” Bejarano said. “No one should die of asthma.”

Asthma can block airways, making it hard to breathe, and in severe cases can cause death if not treated quickly. Nearly 28 million people in the U.S. have asthma, and about 10 people still die every day from the disease, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In May, the White House released a budget proposal that would permanently shutter the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Asthma Control Program, which was already gutted by federal health department layoffs in April. It’s unclear whether Congress will approve the closure.

Last year, the program allotted $33.5 million to state-administered initiatives in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., to help communities with asthma education. The funding is distributed in four-year grant cycles, during which the programs receive up to $725,000 each annually.

Comite Civico del Valle’s academy in Southern California, a clinician workshop in Houston, and asthma medical management training in Allentown, Pennsylvania — ranked the most challenging U.S. city to live in with asthma — are among the programs largely surviving on these grants. The first year of the current grant cycle ends Aug. 31, and it’s unknown whether funding will continue beyond then.

Data suggests that the CDC’s National Asthma Control Program has had a significant impact. The agency’s own research has shown that the program saves $71 in health care costs for every $1 invested. And the asthma death rate decreased 44% between the 1999 launch of the program and 2021, according to the American Lung Association.

“Losing support from the CDC will have devastating impacts on asthma programs in states and communities across the country, programs that we know are improving the lives of millions of people with asthma,” said Anne Kelsey Lamb, director of the Public Health Institute’s Regional Asthma Management and Prevention program. “And the thing is that we know a lot about what works to help people keep their asthma well controlled, and that’s why it’s so devastating.”

The Trump administration cited cost savings and efficiency in its April announcement of the cuts to HHS. Requests for comment from the White House and CDC about cuts to federal asthma and related programs were not answered.

The Information Wars

Fresno, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, is one of the country’s top 20 “asthma capitals,” with high rates of asthma and related emergencies and deaths. It’s home to programs that receive funding through the National Asthma Control Program. Health care professionals there also rely on another aspect of the program that is under threat if it’s shuttered: countrywide data.

The federal asthma program collects information on asthma rates and offers a tool to study prevalence and rates of death from the disease, see what populations are most affected, and assess state and local trends. Asthma educators and health care providers worry that the loss of these numbers could be the biggest impact of the cuts, because it would mean a dearth of information crucial to forming educated recommendations and treatment plans.

“How do we justify the services we provide if the data isn’t there?” said Graciela Anaya, director of community health at the Central California Asthma Collaborative in Fresno.

Mitchell Grayson, chair of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation’s Medical Scientific Council, is similarly concerned.

“My fear is we’re going to live in a world that is frozen in Jan. 19, 2025, as far as data, because that was the last time you know that this information was safely collected,” he said.

Grayson, an allergist who practices in Columbus, Ohio, said he also worries government websites will delete important recommendations that asthma sufferers avoid heavy air pollution, get annual flu shots, and get covid-19 vaccines.

Disproportionate Risk

Asthma disproportionately affects communities of color because of “historic structural issues,” said Lynda Mitchell, CEO of the Asthma and Allergy Network, citing a higher likelihood of living in public housing or near highways and other pollution sources.

She and other experts in the field said cuts to diversity initiatives across federal agencies, combined with the rollback of environmental protections, will have an outsize impact on these at-risk populations.

In December, the Biden administration awarded nearly $1.6 billion through the EPA’s Community Change Grants program to help disadvantaged communities address pollution and climate threats. The Trump administration moved to cut this funding in March. The grant freezes, which have been temporarily blocked by the courts, are part of a broader effort by the Trump EPA to eliminate aid to environmental justice programs across the agency.

In 2023 and 2024, the National Institutes of Health’s Climate Change and Health Initiative received $40 million for research, including on the link between asthma and climate change. The Trump administration has moved to cut that money. And a March memo essentially halted all NIH grants focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI — funds many of the asthma programs serving low-income communities rely on to operate.

On top of those cuts, environmental advocates like Isabel González Whitaker of Memphis, Tennessee, worry that the proposed reversals of environmental regulations will further harm the health of communities like hers that are already reeling from the effects of climate change. Shelby County, home to Memphis, recently received an “F” on the American Lung Association’s annual report card for having so many high ozone days. González Whitaker is director of EcoMadres, a program within the national organization Moms for Clean Air that advocates for better environmental conditions for Latino communities.

“Urgent asthma needs in communities are getting defunded at a time when I just see things getting worse in terms of deregulation,” said González Whitaker, who took her 12-year-old son to the hospital because of breathing issues for the first time this year. “We’re being assaulted by this data and science, which is clearly stating that we need to be doing better around preserving the regulations.”

Back in California’s Imperial Valley — where the majority-Hispanic, working-class population surrounds California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea — is an area called Bombay Beach. Bejarano calls it the “forgotten community.” Homes there lack clean running water, because of naturally occurring arsenic in the groundwater, and residents frequently experience a smell like rotten eggs blowing off the drying lakebed, exposing decades of pesticide-tinged dirt.

In 2022, a 12-year-old girl died in Bombay Beach after an asthma attack. Bejarano said she later learned that the girl’s school had recommended that she take part in Comite Civico del Valle’s at-home asthma education program. She said the girl was on the waiting list when she died.

“It hit home. Her death showed the personal need we have here in Imperial County,” Bejarano said. “Deaths are preventable. Asthma is reversible. If you have asthma, you should be able to live a healthy life.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The post In a Dusty Corner of California, Trump’s Threatened Cuts to Asthma Care Raise Fears appeared first on kffhealthnews.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content emphasizes environmental justice, public health protections, and critiques of budget cuts under the Trump administration, framing them as harmful to vulnerable and low-income communities. It highlights the negative impact of deregulation and funding reductions on asthma programs, particularly those benefiting marginalized groups. While it maintains a factual and measured tone, its focus on environmental regulation, public health funding, and social equity aligns with center-left perspectives that prioritize government intervention to address health disparities and environmental issues.

ST. LOUIS — Violent crime was already trending down from a covid-era spike when President Donald Trump presented a picture of unbridled crime in America on the campaign trail in 2024. Now his administration has eliminated about $500 million in grants to organizations that buttress public safety, including many working to prevent gun violence.

In Oakland, California, a hospital-based program to prevent retaliatory gun violence lost a $2 million grant just as the traditionally turbulent summer months approach. Another $2 million award was pulled from a Detroit program that offers social services and job skills to young people in violent neighborhoods. And in St. Louis, a clinic treating the physical and emotional injuries of gunshot victims also lost a $2 million award.

They are among 373 grants that the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly terminated in April. The largest share of the nixed awards were designated for community-based violence intervention — programs that range from conflict mediation and de-escalation to hospital-based initiatives that seek to prevent retaliation from people who experience violent injuries.

Gun violence is among America’s most deadly public health crises, medical experts say.

Among programs whose grants were terminated were those for protecting children, victims’ assistance, hate-crime prevention, and law enforcement and prosecution, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. The grants totaled $820 million when awarded, but some of that money has been spent.

“Not only are these funds being pulled away from worthy investments that will save lives,” said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, “but the way that this was done — by pulling authorized funding without warning — is going to create a lasting legacy of mistrust.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” according to a statement provided by agency spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation, including funding for clinics that engage in race-based selectivity.”

The Council on Criminal Justice analysis of the terminated grants found that descriptions of 31% of them included references to “diversity,” “equity,” “race,” “racial,” “racism,” or “gender.”

Baldassarre’s statement said the department is committed to working with organizations “to hear any appeal, and to restore funding as appropriate.” Indeed, it restored seven of the terminated grants for victims’ services after Reuters reported on the cuts in April.

But the cuts have already prompted layoffs and reductions at other organizations around the country. Five groups filed a lawsuit on May 21 to restore the grants in their entirety.

Joseph Griffin, executive director of the Oakland nonprofit Youth Alive, which pioneered hospital-based violence intervention in the 1990s, said his organization had spent only about $60,000 of its $2 million grant before it was axed. The grant was primarily to support the intervention program and was awarded for a three-year period but lasted just seven months. The money would have helped pay to intervene with about 30 survivors of gun violence to prevent retaliatory violence. He’s trying to find a way to continue the work, without overtaxing his team.

“We will not abandon a survivor of violence at the hospital bedside in the same way that the federal government is abandoning our field,” he said.

Related Links

• Hospital Gun-Violence Prevention Programs May Be Caught in US Funding Crossfire Mar 13, 2025
• Super Bowl Rally Shooting Victims Pick Up Pieces, but Gun Violence Haunts Their Lives Oct 17, 2024
• ‘Everybody in This Community Has a Gun’: How Oakland Lost Its Grip on Gun Violence Nov 28, 2023

The cuts are also hitting St. Louis, often dogged by being labeled one of the most dangerous cities in America. The city created an Office of Violence Prevention with money available under former President Joe Biden, and various groups received Justice Department grants, too.

Locals say the efforts have helped: The 33% drop in the city’s homicide rate from 2019 to 2024 was the second-largest decrease among 29 major cities examined by the Council on Criminal Justice.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that there’s some positive impact from the work that’s happening,” said University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Chris Sullivan, who received a grant from the Justice Department to assess the work of the city’s new Office of Violence Prevention. That research grant remains in place.

But the Justice Department slashed two other grants in St. Louis, including $2 million for Power4STL. The nonprofit operates the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, dubbed the BRIC, which provides free treatment for physical and mental injuries caused by bullets.

The BRIC had about $1.3 million left on its grant when the award was terminated in April. LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who founded the clinic in 2020, said it was intended to fund a mobile clinic, expand mental health services, evaluate the clinic’s programs, and pay for a patient advisory board. The BRIC won’t abandon those initiatives, Punch said, but will likely need to move slower.

Keisha Blanchard joined the BRIC’s advisory board after her experience as a patient at the clinic following a January 2024 gun injury. Someone fired a bullet into her back from the rear window of a Chevy Impala while Blanchard was out for a lunchtime stroll with a friend from her neighborhood walking group. The shooting was random, Blanchard said, but people always assume she did something to provoke it. “It’s so much shame that comes behind that,” she said.

The 42-year-old said the shooting and her initial medical treatment left her feeling angry and unseen. Her family wasn’t allowed to be with her at the hospital since the police didn’t know who shot her or why. When she asked about taking the bullet out, she was told that the common medical practice is to leave it in. “We’re not in the business of removing bullets,” she recalled being told. At a follow-up appointment, she said, she watched her primary care doctor google what to do for a gunshot wound.

“Nobody cares what’s going to happen to me after this,” Blanchard recalled thinking.

Before she was referred to the BRIC, she said, she was treated as though she should be happy just to be alive. But a part of her died in the shooting, she said. Her joyful, carefree attitude gave way to hypervigilance. She stopped taking walks. She uprooted herself, moving to a neighborhood 20 miles away.

The bullet stayed lodged inside her, forcing her to carry a constant reminder of the violence that shattered her sense of safety, until Punch removed it from her back in November. Blanchard said the removal made her feel “reborn.”

It’s a familiar experience among shooting survivors, according to Punch.

“People talk about the distress about having bullets still inside their bodies, and how every waking conscious moment brings them back to the fact that that’s still inside,” Punch said. “But they’re told repeatedly inside conventional care settings that there’s nothing that needs to be done.”

The Justice Department grant to the BRIC had been an acknowledgment, Punch said, that healing has a role in public safety by quelling retaliatory violence.

“The unhealed trauma in the body of someone who’s gotten the message that they are not safe can rapidly turn into an act of violence when that person is threatened again,” Punch said.

Community gun violence, even in large cities, is concentrated among relatively small groups of people who are often both victims and perpetrators, according to researchers. Violence reduction initiatives are frequently tailored to those networks.

Jennifer Lorentz heads the Diversion Unit in the office of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney, the city’s chief prosecutor. The unit offers mostly young, nonviolent offenders an opportunity to avoid prosecution by completing a program to address the issues that initially led to their arrest. About 80% of the participants have experienced gun violence and are referred to the BRIC, Lorentz said, calling the clinic critical to her program’s success.

“We’re getting them these resources, and we’re changing the trajectory of their lives,” Lorentz said. “Helping people is part of public safety.”

Punch said the BRIC staffers were encouraged during the Justice Department application process to emphasize their reach into St. Louis’ Black community, which is disproportionately affected by gun violence. He suspects that emphasis is why its grant was terminated.

Punch likened the grant terminations to only partially treating tuberculosis, which allows the highly infectious disease to become resistant to medicine.

“If you partially extend a helping hand to somebody, and then you rip it away right when they start to trust you, you assure they will never trust you again,” he said. “If your intention is to prevent violence, you don’t do that.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The post Trump Decried Crime in America, Then Gutted Funding for Gun Violence Prevention appeared first on kffhealthnews.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content critically highlights the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for community-based violence prevention programs, portraying these cuts as harmful to public safety and supportive efforts, especially for marginalized communities affected by gun violence. The emphasis on the negative impacts of the cuts, inclusion of expert criticism, and detailed depiction of social programs suggest a perspective more aligned with center-left viewpoints that prioritize public health approaches to crime and emphasize the importance of community intervention and support services.