Safe Care Living the Pledge: Self Care for Safe Care

Posted on August 25, 2021 by Julie Apold

Staff at all levels are experiencing stress and burnout from their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, and unfortunately, we know the pandemic is not over. To address this stress and help teams thrive, the LeadingAge Minnesota Foundation is releasing a set of resources to help teams and individual staff process, recover, and renew from the trauma of COVID-19.

The latest Safe Care Living the Pledge activity, Self Care for Safe Care, will help you create an environment where teams thrive and find joy. We will focus on one activity every two months from The Bounce Back Project™ to retrain our minds to focus on the positive and increase our sense of happiness and well-being. These activities will be small and easy to add to your day.

Here is a suggested schedule for Self Care for Safe Care:
Sept. and Oct.: Random Acts of Kindness
Nov. and Dec.: Three Good Things 
Jan. and Feb.: Gratitude
March and April: Social Connections
May and June: Mindfulness & Self-Care
July and Aug.: Resilience

First Up: Random Acts of Kindness
In Sept. and Oct., encourage staff in your community to perform at least one Random Act of Kindness each week through either their words or actions. Research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that performing an act of kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise that has been tested.  

You can find all the resources and tools for bringing Random Acts of Kindness to your community on the Self Care for Safe Care site.

We all have times when we feel like we’re at our limit—with residents, co-workers, families or in our personal lives—and it’s helpful to have some simple tools that will help us bounce back from these moments. You can find additional free resources for coaching, small group training, and more, all funded through a LeadingAge Minnesota Foundation grant.For more information on Self Care for Safe Care or our other resiliency and mental health support resources, reach out to Jenna Kellerman or Julie Apold.