Help Shape the Future of Assisted Living in North Carolina
The NCALA Board of Directors is seeking nominations for upcoming board seat vacancies.
Board members help advance NCALA’s mission: to support quality assisted living by working to create a business environment that respects the needs of both assisted living providers and the consumers who utilize their services.
Marissa Fernandez @mcknightsseniorliving.com reports about a special program at Magnolia Glen.
Handwritten letters, homemade crafts and treats such as popsicles are just some of the items exchanged through a cross-generational program between North Carolina first-graders and residents in a nearby independent living and assisted living community.
The program pairs Green Magnet Elementary School students with residents from Magnolia Glen, a Kisco Senior Living community, which allows students and residents to create one-on-one connections. One of those pairs includes a deaf student and a former educator of deaf students.
“It really, really brightened the residents’ day. It gave them such purpose,” said Kara Smith, Magnolia Glen’s sales director.
Smith started the program earlier this year in collaboration with her daughter’s first-grade teacher, Maria Truitt.
“I want my own children to experience the joy and the depth of relationships of people who are in different age ranges than they are, in different life stages than they are, who have walked through different stories and different seasons of life,” Smith told McKnight’s Senior Living.
The letters represent “the little joys in life” with students asking questions about favorite colors and food, Truitt said in a press release. She added that the letters are exchanged every few weeks and they have helped build meaningful relationships across generations.
In addition to letters, Smith said that both residents and children often sent crafts or pictures. Many artists live in Magnolia Glen and loved the paintings made by the first graders, she said.
“It doesn’t have to just be limited to letter writing. There’s a lot of other creative ways that we can connect students with senior adults,” Smith said.
Plans already are underway to continue the program next school year, she said, adding that she hopes to help coordinate a field trip for students to visit Magnolia Glen and meet their pen pals in person.
“Community is so vital to senior adults. Community is so vital to children,” Smith said. “That is something that doesn’t matter what age you are, we need to experience the connection of community.”
Raleigh, NC – June 12, 2026 – Spring Arbor communities throughout North Carolina will celebrate Memory Care Week from June 15 – 20, 2026. This week offers an opportunity for the communities to honor, celebrate, and bring awareness to the meaningful lives, stories, relationships, and connections within Memory Care.
The week culminates with The Longest Day recognition on June 20, 2026. Historically, the longest day of the year has been a time to bring greater awareness and support for those impacted by Alzheimer’s and dementia. The longest day has more light than any other day and serves as a metaphor to outshine the darkness of dementia. The longest day also signifies the 24/7 reality of caregiving for loved ones with all forms of dementia.
Each community will host events and special programs to honor their residents’ unique stories, highlight the compassion and dedication behind Memory Care, and create meaningful moments.
Examples of Memory Care Week celebrations across the state will include:
There are 12 Spring Arbor communities in North Carolina – Spring Arbor of Cary and Spring Arbor of Apex in the Triangle region, Spring Arbor of Sandhills in Fayetteville, Spring Arbor of Steele Creek in Charlotte, Spring Arbor of Greensboro, Spring Arbor of Wilmington, Spring Arbor of Albemarle, Spring Arbor of Wilson, Spring Arbor of Rocky Mount, Spring Arbor of Kinston, Spring Arbor of Greenville, and Spring Arbor of Outer Banks – and all are participating in Memory Care Week.
All communities are active members in the North Carolina Assisted Living Association.
Spring Arbor communities provide assisted living and memory care in a setting focused on consistency, comfort, and connection. The communities emphasize social interaction, daily engagement, and time to enjoy personal interests. With a focus on individualized support and a steady approach to care, residents and families can feel confident in the care provided.
Memory Care options deliver additional support for residents suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Memory Care is tailored to the specific and personal needs of a resident with a focus on nurturing the mind, body, and spirit collectively.
Spring Arbor is part of the Allegro Living family of assisted living and memory care communities serving residents and their loved ones. Allegro communities offer residents a lifestyle focused on wellness, connection, and personalized support, including assisted living and memory care options, on-site therapy, and engaging daily programming that helps residents live life to the fullest. For additional information and to find an Allegro Living community, visit Allegro’s website.
About Allegro Living
Allegro Living develops and manages senior living communities across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Midwest, bringing more than 45 years of experience serving older adults and their families. Through its Allegro, Alto, and Spring Arbor brands, Allegro Living offers resident-centered lifestyles focused on wellness, connection, and personalized support, including assisted living and memory care. Learn more at www.allegroliving.com.
2026 Best of the Best Awards
Brookdale Senior Living- Make It Mine
A branded web series that features professional designers transforming selected residents’ living spaces in just one day, creating personalized, functional homes while engaging audiences through entertaining, lifestyle-focused content.
The Arbor Company- The Golden Gang Podcast
A first of its kind, senior‑living‑based podcast that amplifies resident voices through candid, on‑site conversations, fostering meaningful engagement, challenging perceptions of aging, and strengthening connections within communities and beyond through a scalable, low‑resource model.
2026 Argentum Hero Awards
A new resident wellness solution empowering senior living teams to transform social wellness insights into actionable interventions
The wellness intelligence system is anchored by three core components: validated clinical instruments, rigorous research, and resident engagement signals
DENVER—April 15, 2026—LifeLoop, the leading proactive engagement and whole-person wellness platform for senior living, today launched its Wellness Navigator, a powerful wellness intelligence solution enabling operators to transform social wellness insights into proactive intervention. Through a clinically aligned and measurable framework, the Wellness Navigator redefines how senior living operators quantify, manage, and improve resident wellness consistently, continuously, and at scale.
Social isolation and loneliness are two of the greatest risks facing older adult well-being. Yet, in many senior living communities, the signals of disconnection—missed activities, fewer interactions, and longer gaps of time between visits—are often fragmented across systems or lost in day-to-day operations. This challenge is compounded by an industry-wide gap of consistent, actionable metrics for life enrichment and clinical teams to collaboratively identify residents at risk and intervene early.
LifeLoop introduces the Wellness Navigator as a new operating model for addressing this challenge. By unifying engagement and clinical insight, daily engagement data is transformed into robust wellness intelligence. The solution enables community teams to proactively anticipate risks, align on a shared view of resident well-being, and deliver timely, informed interventions.
“Senior living operators have always understood how central connection is to resident well-being, but for too long they’ve had to rely on fragmented systems and intuition, and that approach is no longer sustainable,” said Rob Fisher, chief executive officer, LifeLoop. “The Wellness Navigator is not simply another dashboard; it’s how operators can proactively respond to the growing urgency to address social isolation. By turning insights into action, we enable better measurement, which leads to better care. We believe the future of senior living depends on this shift, and we’re committed to building it carefully, rigorously, and transparently.”
At the core of the Wellness Navigator is a research-backed framework that combines validated instruments with real-time engagement data. Together, these components operationalize social wellness—transforming previously siloed indicators into a cross-functional view of holistic resident well-being:
“With the Wellness Navigator, we now have better visibility to easily understand when residents are becoming socially isolated and take immediate action to do something about it,” said Stephanie Sanborn, senior director, innovation & education, Seasons Retirement Communities. “I trust the Social Engagement Index score, because it comes from research, customer feedback, and rigorous testing in the field. It is the missing KPI between engagement and clinical leaders necessary to deliver wellness outcomes.”
The Wellness Navigator was developed in close collaboration with senior living resident engagement and clinical leaders, and grounded in validated, widely recognized industry research. This approach ensures the system reflects real-world workflows while delivering insights community teams can trust and act on every day.
Lydia Nguyen, PhD, principal researcher at LifeLoop, guided the development of the Social Engagement Index and emphasized the importance of advancing how the industry measures and supports resident well-being: “We’re focused on enabling our operator partners with credible and actionable ways to support resident well-being. The Wellness Navigator, anchored by the Social Engagement Index, represents a meaningful evolution for this industry. Rather than relying solely on surveys (whether standardized or internally developed), our approach integrates validated self-report measures with real-world engagement and connection data to provide a more comprehensive and actionable view of the resident experience. This model is dynamic, multi-faceted, and grounded in decades of research, then validated through customer pilots.”
The Wellness Navigator is now available through the LifeLoop platform. To learn more about the Wellness Navigator can benefit your community, visit lifeloop.com/wellness-navigator.
LifeLoop is powering a new era of aging. Trusted by more than 4,700 communities across North America, LifeLoop embeds proactive engagement and whole-person wellness into the daily life of senior living communities. With LifeLoop, senior living providers deliver personalized experiences that foster purpose and connection—helping older adults live not just longer, but better. Learn more at lifeloop.com.
Looking to elevate its social presence online, Cogir Senior Living decided to go to the source, putting out a call to older adult social influencers to share authentic experiences of what it’s like to live in a senior living community.
The company recently launched a search for a content creator through a “Granfluencer Residency” program, an immersive experience that will place a selected individual or couple inside a Scottsdale, AZ, Cogir community for a month. Cogir Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Engagement Heidi Brashear told McKnight’s Senior LIving that the goal is to challenge outdated stereotypes about the sector by providing an authentic view of daily life inside a senior living community.
Cogir is sharing information about the program and recruiting participants from social media, LinkedIn and its website. Employees also are being asked to share information with their friends and family members, to amplify the call’s reach.
The content creator, who must be 65 or older and able to live independently, will document authentic moments of everyday life while living among residents and staff members. Cogir said the program is designed to give a behind-the-scenes look at the relationships, routines and experiences that define modern senior living.
“At Cogir, we believe the best way to understand senior living is to experience it,” Brashear said in a statement. “The Granfluencer Program allows us to open our doors and share the real stories, meaningful relationships and engaging lifestyle our residents enjoy every day.”
The chosen content creator will share experiences across Cogir’s and his or her own personal social media and digital platforms, highlighting resident stories, staff connections, wellness programs, dining experiences and community traditions. For Cogir’s outlets, a team will review content and identify the photos and videos that best represent its audiences.
The granfluencer will be encouraged to actively participate in the community’s programs and events while also creating content that reflects the individual’s own interests and what resonates most with that audience, Brashear said. With multiple communities in the area, the granfluencer also will have the opportunity to attend events across locations, capturing a broader range of experiences.
Although the residency, which begins in May, is expected to last for one month, Brashear said the program could be extended based on how it progresses. The provider also said it will consider hosting another residency in the future based on the success of the inaugural initiative.
At the conclusion of the residency program, Cogir intends to continue the collaboration with additional storytelling designed to help adult children and families of prospective residents navigate the senior living search.
New partner ecosystem moves beyond traditional integrations to deliver high-impact data flows that connect care, engagement, and insight for senior living operators
DENVER—February 19, 2026—LifeLoop, the leading proactive engagement and whole-person wellness platform for senior living, today announced the launch of the OpenLoop Network, a first-of-its-kind partner ecosystem built to champion and lead the interoperability movement in senior living. The OpenLoop Network represents a growing coalition of technology partners committed to transforming disconnected data into powerful, strategic data flows that connect care, engagement, and operational insight for senior living operators. Along with LifeLoop, the flagship OpenLoop Network partners include Accushield, ALIS, August Health, ECP, TELS, and WelcomeHome.
Today, senior living operators face rising expectations for personalized care and operational efficiency while managing numerous, disconnected technology systems to support those initiatives. As organizations scale, this fragmentation creates considerable friction for community teams, impacting their ability to serve their staff, residents, and families. The OpenLoop Network addresses this through structured interoperability, delivering pre-built, maintained data flows that enable operators to reduce IT burden, streamline workflows, and provide teams with the right data at the right time.
The urgency behind this shift is clear across the industry. Argentum’s 2025 report identified the lack of interoperability as the primary technology challenge for senior living operators. Angie Fleenor, chief clinical officer of Sinceri Senior Living, commented, “One of the biggest challenges in senior living is that our systems don’t talk to each other. We have valuable resident insights in LifeLoop, but clinical teams need that same context in the EHR—without duplicating work. When sales, clinical, and engagement teams operate from shared resident insight, we can deliver more consistent, personalized support across the community.”
The flagship OpenLoop Network partners aligning with LifeLoop to drive this interoperability movement forward include:
Accushield – visitor management
ALIS – electronic health record
August Health – electronic health record
ECP – electronic health record
TELS – building management
WelcomeHome – customer relationship management
To explore the OpenLoop Network Flows available from LifeLoop with these partners, visit lifeloop.com/openloop-network.
The network is a collaborative initiative, bringing together technology providers who recognize that interoperability requires more than open APIs and integrations—it requires meaningful high-value data flows that deliver impact and results. Charles Mann, founder of Accushield, emphasized the broader mission behind the initiative: “Accushield joined the OpenLoop Network because connected systems and aligned partners are essential to the future of senior living. Together, we’re helping the industry move beyond siloed systems toward a smarter, more connected experience.” Through this partnership model, members are establishing a stronger foundation for how senior living systems connect and evolve together.
“The OpenLoop Network is a reflection of how we listen to our customers and deliver on the industry’s most pressing challenges,” said Rob Fisher, chief executive officer, LifeLoop. “Siloed systems have limited senior living for too long, which is why this effort is not simply an integration marketplace—it’s a movement toward intelligent interoperability. We’re proud to stand alongside our flagship partners, united around a shared mission, at a time when this level of technology alignment has never been more critical.”
The OpenLoop Network is designed to grow as additional partners join, and new data flows are developed, expanding the availability of curated data flows that simplify implementation, reduce administrative burden, and improve coordination across systems. To learn more about the OpenLoop Network or to become a partner, visit https://lifeloop.com/openloop-network
About LifeLoop
LifeLoop is powering a new era of aging. Trusted by more than 4,700 communities across North America, LifeLoop embeds proactive engagement and whole-person wellness into the daily life of senior living communities. With LifeLoop, senior living providers deliver personalized experiences that foster purpose and connection—helping older adults live not just longer, but better. Learn more at lifeloop.com.
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🎉 Grand Opening Celebration at Waltonwood Lead Mine!
We are proud to announce that Waltonwood Lead Mine, a Singh Senior Living community, officially celebrated its Grand Opening on February 25, 2026 in Raleigh, NC!
The Grewal and Singh family joined our Regional Management team, Executive Director, community staff, and many wonderful guests to cut the ribbon and commemorate this exciting milestone. ✂️✨
At Singh Senior Living, our guiding principles are clear: honesty, integrity, and doing the right thing. This “Tradition of Excellence” is what sets us apart and continues to inspire every community we build.
As part of Singh Development LLC, a family-owned and nationally ranked builder and developer, we’re proud to serve residents across Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia. Our growing portfolio includes:
🏡 Waltonwood Senior Living
🏢 Apartments & Single-Family Homes
🏬 Commercial Real Estate
⛳ The Links of Novi Golf Course (MI)
We’re excited to continue expanding throughout North Carolina, Northern Virginia, and the Atlantic coast—and even more excited to welcome residents and families to Waltonwood Lead Mine.
Here’s to new beginnings and a bright future ahead! 💙
