Business Profile: : Margeliz Center, Yorktown
Margaret Dobkowski said it is difficult for a spouse or other family members to deal with a loved one with ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
There were no adult day care programs in the local area for those with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis and other cognitive disorders until three years ago when Dobkowski and her partner, Eliza Zeoazowski of Mahopac, opened the Margeliz Center Social Adult Day Care Program in Yorktown.
Today’s families often include a sandwich generation with members that have to take care of a job, a family, and an aging parent. Sometimes a wife is married to a much older husband and needs help caring for him, Dobkowski, a Danbury, Connecticut resident, explained last week.
“Caregiver is the most difficult job description out there,” she added. “It’s really time consuming. You have to develop the patience of an angel.”
The Margeliz Center was moved from Somers to Yorktown in the summer of 2013 because additional space was needed to accommodate its programs. The current facility also provides space for outdoor programs. “The outdoor area is what sold us on this building,” Dobkowski said.
The center’s clients come from Brewster to Mount Kisco.
Though the center in Somers opened in 2011, it took over a year of planning before the Yorktown location was ready to open, Dobkowski said.
The name Margeliz is a combination of Margaret and Eliza. The co-owners are both occupational therapists. “That made it easier for us to work with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients,” Dobkowski said. “This is our specialty.”
Dobkowski said the center provides “living room to living room” service for clients. Not only are individuals picked up to be brought to the center, staff can also help prepare a person for their day at home by helping them get dressed, she said. “In many cases you have to do it,” she said.
The Center’s activities focus on a social model. “We’re not a babysitting service,” Dobkowski explained. “We are here to stimulate these people. To really give them a sense of belonging, to interact on a different level than they have with their families.”
The Center, which is open weekdays, provides a continental breakfast, hot lunch and afternoon snack for its clients. It also provides yoga or other physical activities every morning and memory evoking activities, such as discussions about entertainers from the past and the telling of life stories. “We aim to bring those memories back because the more memories a client can tap into the more they can work with that memory,” Dobkowski said. “The center seeks to help keep its clients at the same mental capacity as long as possible.”
There would be hardship on the center’s clients if the facility were not available to them, Dobkowski said. “They literally would be confined to their homes in depression because usually depression develops very quickly when you are sitting in your room and you have no stimulation whatsoever and every day is a just carbon copy of the previous day,” she said. Other center clients would have been placed in various facilities without the same services, she added.
Working and co-owning the center is rewarding, Dobkowski said. “We’re not looking for gratification, but we receive it anyway just because we opened this business with an understanding of what needed to be going on within these walls,” she said.
The Margeliz Center Social Adult Day Care Program is located at 2051 Baldwin Rd., Suite 100 in Yorktown. For more information, call 914-276-7601 or send an e-mail to info@margelizcenter.com.
