Rachel Polcaro has been a member of our Seniors Helping Seniors team since June 2018, joining us as a Client Care Coordinator following her graduation from the University of Massachusetts. In her year and a half with us, Rachel has certainly made her mark with her warm and inviting personality and attention to detail as she matches clients’ needs to the appropriate and compatible caregivers.
Within her role as Client Care Coordinator, Rachel also helps to oversee client and caregiver schedules, and serves as the ‘communication hub’ for our clients, their families, caregivers, geriatric care managers and any other professionals that deal with the day-to-day lives of our clients. Coordinating and managing the care of our clients involves a lot of calls, emails, tracking, note-taking and follow-up, which Rachel handles all with ease! Rachel takes great pride in helping others around her, and finds a great sense of purpose in her role and the tasks at hand.
Rachel began volunteering with individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia when she was in college, which shaped her career goals post-grad. This combined with helping to care for her grandmother with early-onset Alzheimer’s felt like a natural fit, leading Rachel to switch her major to Community Development and Public Health. While in school, she facilitated activity programs for Spanish-speaking seniors (she’s fluent!) with cognitive impairment and worked as a part-time Activities Assistant at a nursing home. Upon graduating, she was eager to move into a client-focused care role, helping those with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia… and the rest is history!
Rachel loves the bonds she’s created with our staff and caregivers, and the constant communication she has with everyone. She notes that it’s a unique bond, filled with an overwhelming amount of compassion, empathy, laughter and understanding for the clients we serve and care for, and we couldn’t surmise this any better. At SHS, we truly are a family, and Rachel is such an integral piece of our familial puzzle. What we do can be hard and pull at your heart at times, but it is rich with experience, personality and validation.