The Club at Abe’s Garden opened its Columbia branch at 1410 Hampshire Pike with a very well-attended ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday morning. The nonprofit is branching out from Nashville to spread its best practices in elder and dementia care.
“We’ve done almost 200 ribbon-cuttings in the last four years, and this is probably our biggest crowd,” observed Columbia’s vice mayor Randy McBroom. “It seems like everybody has a person in their family now who’s going through these issues… You always hear, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’… So this is a building and facility… that is much-needed.”
Board Chairman Mike Shmerling explained to the crowd that he founded Abe’s Garden more than 20 years ago, when his father Dr. Abe Shmerling came down with Alzheimer’s disease and could no longer be cared for by his aging mother.
“Our family got together and we started looking for places, and I will confess I had never been in a nursing home or assisted living in my life,” Shmerling said. “[My father] ended up in four different facilities [before he] passed away… We decided in his memory to create something better.”
After three or four years of driving across the country, surveying “a lot of great programs” at nursing homes and assisted living facilities, Shmerling and his collaborators took notes on many of their best practices but realized that none of the surveyed facilities were learning from one another in a similar way. They created their own nonprofit home that finally brought those best practices together and added some of its own, set it up in the old Park Manor in West Nashville, and named it Abe’s Garden, adding a memory-care unit in 2015.
“None of the facilities we saw [had] their mission as a nonprofit to create and aggregate all these best practices. Maybe one place has a storytelling program, one place has a music program,” Shmerling said. “But [my father’s] biggest issue in his nine years with [Alzheimer’s] in different facilities was chronic boredom and no socialization, which is much more significant than you could imagine.”
Abe’s Garden encourages other caregivers to visit its facilities and pick up its knowledge and lessons, and has opened the Columbia branch partly in the hopes of spreading them.
“We are extremely passionate about disseminating best practices wherever we can and… they are wanted,” said Susannah Dwyer, the CEO of Abe’s Garden.
Board Chair Mike Shmerling and CEO Susannah Dwyer recount the founding and development of Abe’s Garden
“People can experience, ‘What does greatness look like?’” said Shmerling. “That playbook is free, so we have people from all over the country come and share that playbook, create engagement.”
Some Columbia locals, who learned about the Abe’s Garden model during a 2024 information session at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, have already bought into the concept. Connie Hardin, Eva James Crichton, Edward Moore, Lee Brown and the Rev. Chris Bowie formed the Steering Committee, “an anchor team of passionate advocates,” for the Columbia branch.
“[If not for them,] we would not be here today… to provide 30 years of research-backed programming to Columbia,” Dwyer said in praise of the Steering Committee.
The Club at Abe’s Garden has two functions. They offer private in-home care to senior citizens who need it, and their clubhouse is open to elders seeking friendship or mental exercise — including making or listening to music, reading or being read aloud to, along with other activities — between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on business days.
Club Director Ashley Hunter encourages people to visit the facility to see if the club’s programming fits their needs. “We have created a space for them to enjoy and have community with each other and… feel valued,” said Hunter.
The organization is also soliciting institutional sponsors, especially churches, and individual donors to help fund their elder care and socialization, and though they’ve already gotten a good number of volunteers, they can always use more.
“If you love music, if you play the guitar, if you sing, if you play the piano, if you’re a homeschooler, if you want to display some art or do a presentation or do a piano recital or anything like that,” Hunter said, “then come out and let us experience it.”
This article was written by Andrew Pearson and originally published in the August 12th issue of the Mainstreet Maury. It is reprinted here with permission.