Join us for part two of our special series on LIFE Conversations with Senior Helpers, where host Christina Chartrand continues her enlightening conversation with Matt Thornhill, founder of the Openly Gray movement and CEO of Cozy Home Communities. In this episode, Matt shares his vision for innovative senior living solutions and the importance of community as we age. This episode is packed with valuable insights on how to embrace aging positively and the future of senior care.
Meet Our Special Guest
Matt Thornhill is a recognized authority in the senior space, with a career spanning over 40 years in advertising and marketing. He has focused extensively on understanding Baby Boomers and their impact on society. As the founder of the Openly Gray movement, Matt advocates for a shift in the cultural narrative around aging, encouraging older adults to embrace their age and challenge ageism. In addition, Matt is the CEO of Cozy Home Communities, a company dedicated to creating innovative housing solutions for older adults.
Matt Thornhill:
Now, growing older is not going to work out great for everybody. There's plenty of people that are going to have a tough time because of their physical conditions or health conditions or whatever it may be. So it's not going to be a walk in the park for everybody. My father -in used to say it's growing older is not for sissies. You're going to have to deal with the realities that, you know, you get to be 80, 90 and above and the warranty runs out on some of the parts. So there's that reality and then there's the whole dementia and Alzheimer's issues that, you know, we all want to try to avoid. So let's do what we can.
Christina Chartrand:
Brain health is important, right? It really is. It's important to take care of your brain, because that's really where it goes for a lot of things. What you eat, what you do, your exercise, a lot of things play a role in that. One of the topics I wanted to bring up with you, Matt, just because we talk a lot about senior care, you know, and what we do to support. And I am, and a lot of listeners will know, I'm a primary caregiver myself with caring for my 85 year old mom. But I like to talk about just your perspective of where you think senior care is going to go, especially for us down the road. Like who's going to be taking care of us? Are we taking more control of that? Just be curious on your perspective on that.
Matt Thornhill:
Yeah, well, yeah, I've got, let me see if I can organize some thoughts for you. I do think that the trend clearly is that people want to stay in their home as they grow older.
There's this desire to move into some sort of assisted living community or whatever, that's for a precious few. And there's a huge population of Boomers who have no interest in doing that. I saw a study out of Minnesota where they asked 600 Boomers a bunch of questions about growing older and retiring, and zero of the 600 said they ever wanted to live in an assisted living or skilled nursing facility. Man, people don't want to live there. They maybe end up having to live there.
So growing older in your home means you're going to need to figure out how to stay there, whether it's literally the building you're in, or maybe it's a different place that you live, but it's on your own, in a community somewhere. And organizations like Senior Helpers and others that can figure out how do I deliver services to the home cost effectively, I mean, that's going to be a growth business for the foreseeable future. And the reason I know it's really going to happen is that billions of dollars being invested in it across all walks from technology that helps you stay in place to organizations that like healthcare plans like Humana buying home care companies, CVS buying a home care company, a hospital system in Charlotte, largest hospital system in that part of North Carolina has partnered with Best Buy to go in and be the Geek Squad to set up this aging in place technology. So there's a lot of money being invested in.
Christina Chartrand:
Mm -hmm.
Matt Thornhill:
Hospitals are trying to figure out how do we deliver hospital services at home, hospice at home, all of this is at home, at home, at home. So that's the first big trend. But as you know, in your sector, one of the hardest things that everyone's dealing with is you can't find the workers to do the work, to do the care. There's a shortage of direct care workers and has been for years and will continue to be for years. So the question back is, okay, well, who then can provide the care and maybe the technology can help with some of it?
Maybe there'll be, you know, AI robots that can do some of it. But I think eventually we're going to have to figure out how able -bodied older adults can help older adults who are less able -bodied. And maybe it's, it's, that's the workforce that gets turned into, okay, maybe I'm going to need an assistive device to help somebody move from a wheelchair to the bed or wheelchair to the toilet. Cause I'm 72 myself and can't do that, but I can do everything else to help them out. So I can help out my neighbor or my friend or whatever. So I do think that we're going to have to turn to each other, quite honestly, to do some of that.
Christina Chartrand:
That's what I think that is. I have these girlfriends, we've been friends since 12, and we call ourselves, we love the Golden Girls, so we always go call ourselves the golden girls. And we say, well, we're just all gonna live together, and this is what we're gonna do. And this is how we're gonna help and support each other. And I believe in that concept. I think that as a community, you can get together and you can help each other out. And the other thing, Matt, I think about is that this generation for me, supporting my mom and all the things that I've been doing and watching her age is that I don't want to put the burden on my kids, right? I want to take care of this. I want to make sure that the resources are in place. And I want to take more control over what aging is going to look like for me versus just giving it over to someone else. Do you sense that? And with our, with the Boomer generation that we're like, "Hey, we know what we're doing!"
Matt Thornhill:
Yeah, and you know, the reality is that not all Boomers are going to be able to afford to take care of themselves at home. But in fact, a twist on senior living that I see coming is that senior living today is really bifurcated. There's the high end life plan communities that you have to give them, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars up front and you're paying five, six, eight thousand dollars a month for them to take care of. Well, that only reaches the top 8 % of the market? Not very many. Then there's the people that don't make enough income that have to live in the government subsidized assisted living and so forth. And that's like 20 % of the market. Well, what about the middle 70 % of the market? What are they going to do? And there's some of them that are going to be fine, but there's a lot of them that are just not going to be able to do. They don't have enough home equity. They don't have enough income. They maybe have some health issues.
So we could have 75 year olds living under bridges before too long if we don't figure out how to create communities where they're going to live. And perhaps, interestingly, I think the growth area in senior living is to build middle income housing and that's going to be the future. So I think there's going to be a shift that takes place in the senior living space over the course of the next 10, 15 years.
Christina Chartrand:
Are you already seeing that now? Are people, you know, I mean, obviously I see, especially living here in Sarasota, I definitely see that there are new condos that are being built that are focusing on that middle income because it's got so expensive around here that people just can't live in a lot of these areas. And so there's been St. Pete's, they're doing it, Sarasota, they're doing it. I know that even Southamie and Naples, that they're beginning to create these areas where people, you know, affordable, affordable living. Tampa's doing it as well. So I'm curious if you're seeing that trend.
Matt Thornhill:
Yeah, that's the hottest topic in senior living is how do we figure out to accommodate the middle income? But I have to tell you that the product that they're building is not a product people want to move to. It's a product people end up having to move to because it's like moving to a Holiday Inn Express.
You know, with maybe you got two rooms adjoining and that's it. And why sell my house to go live there? I'll just stay in my house, even though I'm alone and that's not healthy and I can't afford to bring people in and that's not healthy and they shorten my life. I just don't want to go live there. And they, those organizations that have built those things are, they're able to fill them up, but it takes them a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of effort to convince somebody to come in. And you talk about 55 plus is kind of the target for adult active adult or independent. The reality is the average age somebody moving into active adult today is 72. And the average age somebody moving into independent living is 82. That's because people don't want to go there. They have to go there.
Christina Chartrand:
So what would be the perfect, what would you see? What's the perfect, if you could advise somebody who is interested in business development for middle income, what would you advise?
Matt Thornhill:
So Christina, are you trying to set me up to talk about Cozy Home?
Christina Chartrand:
You know, I'm just kind of just curious.
Matt Thornhill:
So as you may know, Christina, I left my career in consulting and advertising and started in 2020 a company called Cozy Home Community where we're building small, one story, single family detached homes of 1200 square foot, two bedroom, two bathroom. And we're putting eight to 12 of them in a cluster with an extra building in the middle that's kind of a, we call it the common house or a community building. And then we put these colonies, these clusters, we put three or four or five of them together and we have a Cozy Home Community. And all the homes face into this common area with grass and place of fire pit and such. And the idea is that from age 60 to 80 plus, come live in a community with other people who you'll get to know and we'll help you get to know them. That's part of our strategy. And go through this stage of life together in community.
In fact, if you come and live here and the first one we're building is going to be a rental model, when you sign that lease, part of signing that lease is you agree as long as you're able to give 10 hours a month back to the community. So we set up like a time bank where people say, okay, here's the things that I can do and I'm good at and can help you with. You can post what you need. And it's based on research that's been done that says people are more than willing to help each other.
But people who need help are reluctant to ask because it comes with an obligation. Oh, he did me a favor. Now I got to do him a favor back. Well, if you set up this time bank, everybody knows they're obligated. So everybody helps everybody. And the tasks don't have to be things that Senior Helpers does. The task could be simply going to a doctor's appointment with them or going grocery shopping for them. Or maybe it's taking care of the landscaping in the community or overseeing the bookkeeping or something like that, something to give back to the community. So if we share those duties and responsibilities that can reduce our overall rent, make it affordable to us, we don't have to bring in outside help because we're helping each other. And all I've done is tried to create a place where that can happen, a community where that can happen. And as opposed to just hope that it happens, we're going to be intentional in making it happen. So it's not
Christina Chartrand: So where is this located?
Matt Thornhill: The first one that we're building is going to be in Western Pennsylvania next to a university. Actually, we're building 46 homes across four colonies with four common houses in them. And we are about to break ground. We haven't broken ground yet. The homes themselves are actually modular homes. They're built in the factory in pieces and come and assembled on site. They're just like a stick built home. There's no, it's not a mobile home. It's a regular home. It's just built inside where it stays dry.
Christina Chartrand:
Did you pick like the oldest state there is Allegheny County in Pennsylvania? I think it's like the oldest county in the United States. As far as population aging.
Matt Thornhill:
And, uh, and, no, no, no, no. Really? Uh, well, this is Butler County. So yeah, yeah, this is Butler County and, uh, it's just, it's a perfect site. I've got perfect business partners who own the land and who are going to operate the community when it's up and running. And we're excited to get it, get it going and kind of prove out the concept that people do want to live.
And, you know, we were designing the concept when we started in 2020, not knowing that COVID was coming, but we were designing it, leaning into what we saw the trends. We knew that eventually older adults would come to do telemedicine. We didn't know what happened in a couple of months in the middle of 2020. We knew that older adults would eventually get accustomed to having things delivered like groceries and their pharmacy and all of that. And again, even food delivery from DoorDash.
All of that has happened. And we basically realized that the future of senior living is going to be delivered to your home, but to do it cost effectively, what if I could have, I don't know, somebody from Senior Helpers or a visiting nurse come and spend the day at our place. They could see maybe eight different residents over the course of a day versus driving to five different places in a day. So I can offer it more cost effectively. I can bring in the yoga instructor. I can bring in the dog groomer because I've got 90 plus people. I've aggregated them so I can bring services to them. I don't have to provide the services. I just need to provide the people who need the services so that the community wide services can come in and support it. So that's the idea behind Cozy Home.
Christina Chartrand: I love it. I think it's a great concept. I think it's how people have been thinking about it anyway. All of these things are starting to happen and to have it just kind of seed in one community and I'm assuming you're going to have research. This is what a great research project for someone, right? To be able to, this is fantastic.
Matt Thornhill: Yeah. Well, Christina, part of it that you talked about to you and your girlfriends since age 12, the Golden Girls. Well, that's how it came to me. I remember being at parties and hearing women in their 40s and 50s just say, you know, we're going to outlive the husbands and, you what are we going to do? And it's like, let's buy up a wing of an assisted living facility. Let's buy up a bunch of homes on a cul -de -sac. And a light bulb goes off. I'm like, why don't we just build an intentional community? Because they're going to want to downsize. Let's make it so it's something people will want to move to, not something they have to move to. So thank you.
Christina Chartrand: Exactly. I think it sounds great. I love it. Well, I can't wait. I want to be there when you open this thing. So we'll definitely be there. Matt, I want to thank you so much for participating in our LIFE Conversations. I learned a lot today, a lot of great information for our listeners. I really appreciate it. And to learn more, how can they follow you? Is there some ways that they can follow you?
Matt Thornhill: Well, thank you for having me. Sure they could go to cozyhomecommunity.com, c o z y home community they can go to OpenlyGray.org, and I'm on LinkedIn I'm not hard to find the inner inner web interwebs makes it easy to find me.
Christina Chartrand: Good, that's really great. And yeah, I also see his Facebook as well as Instagram. So he's on social media, Thanks so much for participating and Matt, a pleasure, pleasure to have you here.
Matt Thornhill
It's been my pleasure. Thanks, Christina.
In this enlightening episode, Matt Thornhill shares how Baby Boomers are transforming the perception of aging and the importance of combating ageism through the Openly Gray movement. His insights provide a fresh perspective on aging positively and advocating for older adults. Stay tuned for more episodes of LIFE Conversations with Senior Helpers, where we continue to explore important topics in senior care. Tune in for part two of this conversation, where Matt will discuss his Cozy Home Communities project and the importance of community as we age.
