Resources for You We partner with the nation's leading nonprofit organizations that provide trusted information on a variety of health and caregiving topics that may be helpful to your Community. Learn more by visiting one of them today. Create Free, private, Community web sites for organizing friends, family, and colleagues – a family’s 'circles of community' – during times of need. Coordinate activities and manage volunteers with our intuitive group calendar. Easily communicate and share updates using announcements, message boards, and photos. Safely store vital information. Create a Community. Share Lotsa Today! Finished reading the newsletter? Take a moment to share Lotsa with friends and loved ones.	Dear Friend, WELCOME TO LOTSA COMMUNITY WORKS Featured this month: Love in Caregiving: Read Stephanie's Story Lotsa Tips Feature of the Month Spousal Caregiving Webinar—Register today! February is the month of love. And love is monumentally important when it comes to caregiving. But regardless of whether you’re caring for your husband of 50 years, your 8-year-old child, or 90-year-old grandmother, love is where the caregiving starts. A few weeks ago we got an email from a Lotsa Community member, sharing with us her personal love story as caregiver to her husband. Within minutes, people at Lotsa were gathering and talking about Stephanie’s story. We came together, as we often do, and discussed it. We read and re-read her words and found ourselves profoundly moved. We felt the love when reading Stephanie’s story. You will too. My husband, an internist by training, the outward picture of health, father of our four school-aged children, felt a persistent ping of low-level pain. It felt different enough from a muscle strain that he had an ultrasound on a Thursday in late June. His doctor called him that night and described an oddity in the resulting pictures. At minutes after noon the following Monday, a surgeon at the Lahey Clinic was pointing to a CAT scan of my husband’s pancreas and saying, “This is your tumor…” She added that a radiologist had seen shadows on my husband’s liver. From that moment, he was a full-time patient and I was a full-time caregiver. Read more of Stephanie’s story. Lately we’ve been honored to hear from so many members of Lotsa Communities who wanted to share their stories. As you can imagine, the best way for us to spread the word about Lotsa Helping Hands often comes from re-telling stories from Community members. If you’d like to share yours, simply drop us a note. This month, don't miss our inspiring webinar about spousal caregiving as well as some great tips for coordinators and members and a brand new feature of the Lotsa web site, our Resource Directory. Thanks for reading and passing this on to others you love.      From our Community to yours,           Hal Chapel, Co-Founder & CEO Lotsa Tips Every Lotsa Helping Hands community has Coordinators and Members – Coordinators organize the help. Members are all the volunteers who sign up to help. Each month, we’ll share a tip for each of you! Remember, you can always visit our How it Works page for ideas about how to get the most from your Lotsa Community web site. Tip for Coordinators: Use the Activity Status Report to Send Thank You Messages—The Activity Status Report found in your Administration tab is a clean organized view of everything posted to your Community’s Calendar. You can organize it by date, volunteer, or type of activity. When the winds calm down you can use this tool to organize Thank You’s for those who helped you weather the storm. Tip for Members: Brainstorm New Ways To Help—All Members of a Community web site can add to the Message Board to generate discussion. Why not create a post to find new ways to help? Get creative! Coordinators usually share needs like rides, visits, and meals- but there’s always plenty to do when caregiving. Start a dialogue about helping out with needs more specific to your Community. Whether it’s shoveling or mowing the lawn- every new month brings new needs. Offering different types of help can provide major relief for those organizing support. Tip for all: Not in a Community right now? Share Lotsa with your local town, in your religious group, post a flyer on your Facebook page, or send this newsletter to someone you love today. If Lotsa made it easy for you to volunteer, pass it on! Good help helps everybody. If you have additional questions, contact us at info@lotsahelpinghands.com. Feature of the Month We often come across organizations that provide valuable resources to our Communities. If you’re looking for information, resources or other materials, check out our newly launched Resource Directory. And if you would like to suggest a resource that you’ve found helpful, tell us about it! Free Webinar February 23—One Woman’s Love Story This February, Lotsa Helping Hands is hosting a webinar highlighting what to expect when caring for a spouse. Sylvia Mackey, wife of the late John Mackey, tight end for the 1971 Super Bowl champion Baltimore Colts and Professional Football Hall of Famer, will share her stories and insights from her own caregiving experience. Sherri Snelling, Caregiving Club CEO and author of an upcoming book on celebrities who have been caregivers, will interview Sylvia who is featured in her book, and offer tips on how to prepare to care for a spouse with dementia. Whether you’re caring for a Super Bowl champion, or caring for the champion of your family, join us to learn about all of the resources you have when creating a Lotsa Helping Hands Community web site. Register today!
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