My Committment

In late 2006 after a visit from my good friend and colleague John Bowling I decided to start Helpwithmyparents.com. John and I have both worked for many years in the senior care industry - at first together as psychologists and later separately. John went on the work as an administrator and corporate officer for Silverado Senior Living and I operated outpatient psychiatric programs for seniors. John is now at Southern Oregon University where he continues to advance the cause of senior services and I am running a small outpatient mental health clinic in Salt Lake City.

When John and I get together we spend a lot of time talking about ideas and solutions to problems that we perceive. During that visit in 2006, one of the things we discussed was the difficulty the children of aging parents have finding comprehensive and coordinated information. It was shortly after this that I started working on Helpwithmyparents.com. My goal was, and remains, to provide a single website that can provide comprehensive informative content and information about all of the providers of services to seniors across the whole country. I want a person who lives on one side of the country to know all of the options that available to them, as they search for help for their parent(s), who may live on the other side of the country. I also want them to be able to access information about any situation, circumstance or illness that their parent may be dealing with.

This is an enormous task and it was two years before I felt ready to publish the site to web. The thing that finally allowed me to feel comfortable doing so was the decision to make all of the content pages into wikis (pages that can be edited by users), and to allow service providers to submit their own information to the site. In the 10 months since we launched the site we have made steady progress, but there is much that still needs to be done. Brent Pace has contributed significantly to the design and function of the site and Jeremy Rasmussen has worked wonders on the technical side. We are also now fortunate enough to have Carolyn Hunter whose knowledge of senior issues is proving invaluable to our ongoing efforts.

I made a decision early on that a website like Helpwithmyparents.com is only useful if it can provide free comprehensive and unencumbered access to users. Therefore we do not require people to log in to use the site and we do not charge providers to be listed on the site. I feel strongly that having free unencumbered access is the strength of Helpwithmyparents.com. My commitment to those who use the site is that we will never charge people to use the site and we will never charge businesses and organizations to be listed on the site.

It is my hope, and expectation, that we will be able to generate enough revenue through the banner ads that are available on the site to continue to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of the site, and that users will contribute to the content and provider information available.