Sharon Care Center Activities Director And Volunteer Take Home Awards For Outstanding Work

As Sharon Care Center residents ate lunch earlier this week, Tammy Vessey and Nita Taylor attempted to locate a small craft that Taylor previously made for a resident. After a roughly 10-minute search, the two walked to the dining room and asked the residents where Taylor’s Pinterest-styled creations went. Immediately, residents produced a little black bat made of crafting paper and a purple dog constructed of Hershey’s Kisses and Smarties.

“I haven’t made the same thing twice,” said Taylor of her creations.

Tammy Vessey is the activities director for both assisted living and memory care at Sharon Care Center and Nita Taylor is a volunteer, who works with Vessey. Both recently won awards for their work at Sharon Care Center.

Vessey won Activities Director of the Year from the Washington State Association of Activity Professionals, and Taylor won Support Person of the Year. The organization only gives out four awards at its annual conference.

“For me, this award meant a lot because this award is given to me by my peers, the people that I work with,” Vessey said. “It’s not so much the people that I work with, but the people who do the exact same thing that I do every day.”

Vessey nominated Taylor for Support Person of the Year.

“I don’t know what I would do without her,” Vessey said. “She helps me on every holiday that there is, she makes little paper gifts for every resident. They are usually filled with candy for every single holiday.”

Taylor began volunteering at Sharon Care four years ago when her mother was a resident.

“When she passed away, I just continued,” Taylor said.

Vessey started at Sharon Care in the kitchen, and worked in the dietary department for two years. The administrator at the time said, “You’re working in the wrong department,” Vessey remembered.

Sharon Care Center moved Vessey to activities as an assistant, then sent her to school to become an activity director.

“I went to the memory care and spent five years working in there while I went to school,” Vessey said. “Then I became an activity director when I moved over to assisted living. Now I’m the activity director of assisted living and memory care.”

Vessey said she focuses on keeping residents involved with the community as much as possible.

“When I got over here, that was the challenge was to get them to do craft projects,” Vessey said. “The thing that they would say was ‘Well, we don’t need anything else for our rooms. What can we do for someone else? So I said, ‘Okay, that’s what we need to do. We need to give back to the community.’”

Vessey plans daily projects for the residents, most of which are centered around community involvement.

“They like to do the community service projects,” Vessey said. “Any kind of craft project, any kind of project that we are doing, it has to have a meaning — it has to be going somewhere. I think my favorite one is when the readers from the Fords Prairie grade school come across every year at Halloween and they parade through our building.”

This year the residents filled a bag of candy for every student.

“They bring all the kids across the street and they make their little masks and parade downstairs,” Vessey said. “What our residents do to get ready for that is every year we do a different project where they are making treats for all of those kids. This year they did Tootsie Rolls in a bag and they sat for hours on end filling 600 Zip Lock bags of Tootsie Rolls for all those kids.”

These projects, Vessey said, are the ones that keep residents engaged.

“They don’t want to do it for themselves,” Vessey said. “They want to do it for someone else.”