Volunteering

JoAnn Baird is a committed learner. Education has been a central theme of both her professional and personal lives. As JoAnn puts it, “I am a lifelong learner who believes in staying mentally fit as well as physically fit.”

Don is an artist. He studied in Canada and privately in Europe, and graduated from college with a degree in Visual Arts. He has been a professional art instructor and has shown his work in the US, Canada and Europe. His work can be found in several private and public collections. Art is his passion, his essence.

With age can come a decline in memory and with the advent of retirement, Don became concerned about this, and especially how it might affect his love of painting. As time passed, he began to feel that his creativity was stalling.

Interpersonal communication has always been important to Ed Steenerson, first as a rehabilitation psychologist and later as an engineer and manager in the high-tech industry. Ed’s leadership and team-building skills were all the more remarkable in light of the head trauma he had suffered from a serious injury in his teens. Through hard work and persistence, Ed had learned to overcome the after-effects on his memory and cognition. But while working for a Fortune 100 company in his early 40s, things began to fall apart.

56-year old Kenneth Flores had worked as an electrician since he immigrated to California from Belize in 1972. But when the state passed a law requiring that electricians be certified, he was in trouble. “I took the test 3 times,” Flores said, “and all 3 times, I failed.” Without the certification, Flores says he was out of work for a year. During that time, he took a Brain Fitness Program class as part of the Los Angeles School District’s adult education program.