Reverie to Reality: Twilight Wish Foundation Makes Elders Dreams Come True

By Juliann Schaeffer
 
Through donations and volunteers, this unique organization responds to older adults’ personal requests. Granting elders’ special wishes prompts smiles, joy, gratitude, and serenity.

Think back: When was the last time you thanked an elder for his or her countless lifetime contributions? If you ask Cass Forkin, she would likely answer, “Every day.” Forkin, the founder of the Twilight Wish Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Doylestown, PA,  that celebrates the lives of elders by granting wishes for those in need, gives older adults something to smile about. But looking back five years, you’d find that Forkin wasn’t unlike many people, until three elder women opened her mind to a world of possibilities.

She relates the following story. “I was sitting in a diner in Bucks County [PA] with my daughter, who was in the process of getting her driver’s license. We looked over and there were these seniors that [sic] were sitting at another table, three ladies that[sic] were quite elderly, and it was time for them to pay for their $4.99 buffet lunch. They were counting out the dollars very slowly, and I just looked at them, and I immediately realized that this was a big treat for them. They probably went out together once a month, on a fixed income, and there were no husbands. And I thought, let me just treat them today, and they can have an extra day out this month.

“So I called the waitress over, and I told her that I wanted to treat them. I paid her and I told her to keep it anonymous because I really didn’t want my daughter to be embarrassed (she was a teenager at the time). And so when I looked over again, the waitress was pointing us out. So [the elder women] came over to the table, and one of the ladies asked me to stand. I stood up and she just hugged me really deep, and she said, ‘We didn’t know there were people like you anymore.’ It was such a statement to me about the generations; it really caught me.”

Over the next few months, Forkin couldn’t shake the feeling from that diner—that what had transpired involved more than a single day’s events. “I was thinking about how we spend $100 on a video game that kids might play with for a few months, and here, $20 for a meal for these seniors meant so much to them. And [I also thought about how] we don’t have any mechanism to show seniors in this country that we remember, thank, and honor them,” she says.

Two months later, Forkin acted on her epiphany by starting a foundation that would do joyful things for older adults and bring comfort to those in need. It fills a niche where no similar organization exists. “Everyone knows of Make-A-Wish [Foundation] for children, and that’s up to the age of 18. Well, what happens if you’re 68 or older and you have a wish? There’s nobody to make it come true,” she says. And thus, the Twilight Wish Foundation was born.

Forkin had an agonizing time choosing a name for the organization. “I didn’t want anything with silver or golden in it; I wanted [the name] to imply that fun was involved,” she says. But after uncovering some inspiration at the most unlikely of places—an amusement park—she filed the paperwork for the 501(c)(3) organization and officially started the Twilight Wish Foundation in 2003. “[In the beginning,] I got an amazing amount of support from a local women’s organization, called the Women’s Business Forum of Bucks County. Within one week, I had someone who was helping me do all of the public relations work; I had someone building a Web site; and we were going on television talking about Twilight Wish. It was just amazing how much happened in a one week period of time,” she says.

To find out what might provide pleasure for older adults, Forkin asked her friend Len Collier, who practiced group therapy at nursing homes, to have residents complete an anonymous survey to discover some of the things nursing home residents desired. “He came back with a list that included trips to the zoo, dinner shows, and getting their hair done,” she says.

But one woman’s request sent Forkin reeling. “One woman (at the time I didn’t know who she was) wrote that she wanted a headstone for her son who had recently passed away. When I read that and realized that we were talking about a woman in a nursing home who was in a wheelchair and who didn’t even have teeth and could have used teeth, but what she wanted was a tombstone for her son, it hit me really hard,” she says. “This was supposed to be all about fun and joy and reading that I had to sit down and immediately redo what I thought was fun and joy to comfort and joy because this woman would be so happy to know that her son had a tombstone. He had no other family and no one to pay for a stone, and she had no money. He had passed away the year before in his 60s (she was in her 80s),” says Forkin of the woman who eventually received the first wish ever granted by the foundation.

Fast forward five years to 2008. Twilight Wish Foundation currently has nine chapters in Florida, California, Illinois, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Although the organization has operations in eight states, Forkin says its volunteers span the entire nation. “We have volunteers throughout the country that help us with wishes that we make come true,” she says.

Behind the Scenes
The Twilight Wish Foundation accepts support from both corporations and volunteers. Funding for wish granting comes from numerous places, including corporate sponsors and a plethora of individual donors and volunteers. “On the individual level, [donors and volunteers] want to be part of making the whole wish happen. But we also need big corporate sponsors to help us cover all the costs of what we do on a daily basis,” she says.

Volunteer applications are available on the organization’s Web site. “Volunteers can do direct services working with the seniors, they can help us grant wishes, or they can be on our committees,” says Forkin, detailing the wish committee that peruses wish applications and the business development committee that plans special events and organizes fundraising.

Also on its Web site is the three-page wish-granting application. Elders can request a wish for themselves, or a caretaker or family member can request a wish for an older adult. The primary requirements include the following:
• The elders having a wish granted must be aged 68 or older.
• The elders’ income must be 200% of poverty level or below ($20,800 per year), making them unable to grant their own wishes.
• The elders must be able to speak cognizantly and carry out their wishes.

Forkin explains the third requirement, noting,  “We have a lot of family members who realize that their elderly parent or grandparent is now in the stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We had someone put a wish in that someone wanted a trip to France, but [the elder] wasn’t cognizantly able to formulate that [himself], so that would not be a wish that we would grant. Yet somebody in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who wants to go to a Phillies game and meet their favorite players, we will do that.”

Selecting Wish Winners
So how does The Twilight Wish Foundation choose those whose wishes will be granted? Every month, its wish committee meets to sort through all the new applications, determining who fits the requirements and whose wishes it can feasibly grant. “And it doesn’t happen right away,” Forkin is quick to point out. “If we accept somebody into our wish program, somebody can have a wish granted in a month, but it can also take three years,” she says, adding that on average wishes take roughly six months for the organization to assign them to volunteer wish granters, who then bring the wishes to fruition.

Like many nonprofit organizations, Twilight Wish can grant only as many wishes as it has donors to fund them. “We have granted almost 1,000 wishes [as of July]. Yet on our books, we have about 128 wishes that are not yet granted, and probably three quarters of them are because we don’t have the funding.”

Forkin adds that if funding is the only thing holding back an elder’s wish, then it is posted on the organization’s Web site for someone to sponsor. “For our wishes on our Web site, we’ve had a good number of them sponsored by someone across the country who read it and said, ‘I want to make that wish happen.’ So once the sponsoring takes place, we can grant the wish,” she says.

Wish Away
The types of wishes the organization grants are wide and varied, as Forkin can attest. And although she admits that she can’t fulfill all of the requests that well-deserving elders may dream of (“It’s hard to get Tiger Woods!” she laments with a laugh.), Twilight Wish is still making dreams come true for many.

For instance, Forkin describes a one-of-a-kind partnership it has with the hearing aid organization Zounds. “[Zounds] saw that we are in a lot of the geographical areas that they are in, and they are willing to grant 80 hearing aid wishes for us this year,” she says, adding that the donation is no small feat, as the price of hearing aids can often exceed $2,000 for a pair. “If you have Medicaid, Medicare, or veterans insurance, they don’t pay for hearing aids. So a lot of people in our country can’t hear and they’re isolated. This partnership improves the quality of life of so many people,” Forkin says.

Another business that has stepped up to the plate to help Twilight Wish is Sunrise Senior Living, which operates assisted living facilities across the United States. It has donated $25,000 to grant elder wishes and is willing to match that amount if its Philadelphia-area Sunrise facility can raise the money. “To me, that speaks volumes because what they’re saying is, ‘We recognize that what you’re doing isn’t necessarily going to help our people, but it’s going to help other people who can’t afford it,’” says Forkin.

Yet the most poignant stories may come from the individual wishes the organization has granted for everyday folks. Take Percy Swanson, 94, a nursing home resident from Woodstock, IL, who was recently granted his lifetime wish—to meet Vanna White—during a taping of Wheel of Fortune in Chicago. The lifelong resident of the Midwest, who spent his younger days as a farmer, highway department worker, and city councilman, relished the chance to meet Hollywood stars White and Pat Sajak, whom he had watched for years on television in his home.

“Percy was so excited that he was standing up dancing to the music during their little intermission, and Pat Sajak came over and danced with him and accidentally knocked over his wheelchair,” Forkin says of the fun-loving resident who to this day can’t believe his dream came true.

Or consider Bobbie Joe Flater, a Vietnam veteran, whose dream of flying in a fighter jet came true in April thanks to Twilight Wish and two local pilots. Flater, age 75, of Southampton, NJ, enlisted in the army in 1950, and although he served his country for 21 years in various spots across the globe, including Korea and two tours in Vietnam where he earned a Bronze Star, he never had the opportunity to ride in a fighter jet. Yet it remained a lifelong dream.

Allen H. Smith III, a local aerobatic pilot and air show performer, flew Flater in his restored L-39, a Russian fighter jet. One of 12 aerobatic pilots in the nation who hold the highly coveted Aerobatic Competency Examination Level One rating in the L-39, Smith and  Dino Peros, a former U.S. Marine Corps pilot and major, were instrumental in making Flater’s wish come true.

Every older adult who has a wish granted through Twilight Wish receives a certificate of thanks and appreciation. “And that is because we do not look at this as charity to seniors; we look at this as a thank you for everything they’ve done, which is very important for seniors,” Forkin says. “In addition, we give a certificate of thanks to anyone who’s helped us grant a wish, whether they were the sponsors or the volunteers.”

Reviewing the past and considering the organization’s future, Forkin says she feels  fortunate to have been involved in making the dreams of so many elders come true. “Basically, it’s an idea whose time has come,” she says.

— Juliann Schaeffer is an editorial assistant at Aging Well.