Time to connect: Best Friends of Lexington pioneered dementia care around the world, still welcomes participants here

Wouldn’t it be helpful to learn techniques to better communicate with a friend living with dementia? Thirty years ago, Best Friends Day Center in Lexington pioneered new approaches in dementia care that are now used in more than 30 countries. While the Best Friends approach has spread around the world, we still need to spread it throughout our community. That way more people will know how to communicate in a positive and helpful manner with people living with dementia.

Volunteers learn techniques to help be a best friend to persons living with dementia. We learn our friends’ life stories and visit with a friend one afternoon a week at the day center. Through our friends’ stories, we make connections that validate their past and present. We laugh together, support and love one another.

To join or get more information about the Best Friends approach, call Taylor Pennie or Bobby Potts at (859) 258-2226. If you have a musical talent you’d like to share, you could arrange a time to come and perform.

A version of this letter published earlier had an incorrect phone number.

This story was originally published April 5, 2017 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Time to connect: Best Friends of Lexington pioneered dementia care around the world, still welcomes participants here."