A Future ClearPath Initiative
Where the oldest and the youngest look after one another.
The Connected Care Initiative is something we hope to build in the years ahead, alongside a senior center that shares the vision—a place in Payson, Arizona where seniors and children come together under one roof, turning two kinds of isolation into one community where no one is invisible.
Picture a place where a retired teacher steadies the small hands of a four-year-old planting her first seeds in a sunlit garden. Where laughter moves through bright, open rooms as children and elders make art, share stories, and form bonds that cross seventy years in a single afternoon.
That is what the Connected Care Initiative will be: an intergenerational campus that answers the real needs of two groups at once—seniors who have time, skill, and wisdom but no one left who needs it, and children who need attention, steadiness, and an adult with time to listen. Brought together, each becomes the answer to the other.
Why this lives inside ClearPath
ClearPath builds and sells technology that helps people live safely and independently at home—and that work comes first. The Connected Care Initiative is the larger project it is meant to fund: once the company has earned its place in people’s homes, a deliberate share of what it earns goes to building this. The company is the engine. This is what the engine is being built for. And it isn’t something we would build alone—this is a future we hope to create together with an interested and willing senior center, when the time and the right partner come.
The need
Behind closed doors across Payson, two quiet struggles play out every day.
For our seniors
Margaret, 83
Some weeks she hasn’t spoken to anyone but her cat in four days. Her mind is sharp and her hands are skilled from decades as a seamstress—but no one needs what she can offer anymore, and the choice between groceries and medication is a monthly one. Each day blurs into the next without purpose.
For our children
Ethan, 6
His mother works two jobs and can barely afford basic childcare, let alone anything enriching—he’s on his third babysitter this month. He’s bright and full of questions, but he’s started to wonder why no adult ever seems to have the time to hear the answer.
Margaret and Ethan are composites—but their needs are real, and they live three miles apart. Connected Care puts them in the same room.
The model
Five parts, one community.
An integrated campus
Connected buildings and shared outdoor space designed so the lives of children and elders naturally cross—a community garden, a central courtyard, shaded seating built for conversation between generations.
Shared core services
One central kitchen serving on-site meals and Meals on Wheels. Coordinated transportation. Cross-trained volunteers. Running these once instead of twice is what funds everything else.
Intergenerational programming
The heart of it. Reading buddies. A garden planted in spring and harvested together in fall. Life-story projects where children help preserve an elder’s memories. A retired tradesperson teaching a teenager a skill that took a lifetime to earn.
A technology & innovation hub
Coding and AI education with a focus on women who were never invited into those fields, run in part through neighborhood and church-based learning hubs—plus a design lab where both generations solve community problems side by side.
Built around universal needs
Every program is designed around what every person needs at any age: connection and belonging, purpose and meaning, security, dignity, and room to keep growing.
Why it works
This isn’t a hunch.
Decades of research into intergenerational care point the same direction. Seniors who spend regular, purposeful time with children report less loneliness and depression, and stay engaged—mentally and physically—for longer. Children in these settings show stronger social and emotional development and far less age bias. And co-locating services for both groups lowers operating costs, because space, meals, transportation, and staff are shared rather than duplicated.
The clearest proof is already running. At Providence Mount St. Vincent in Seattle, a care home shares its building with a children’s center, and residents and preschoolers spend their days together—singing, eating, making things. The program drew national attention as the subject of the documentary Present Perfect. We intend to build Connected Care on the same principle, designed from the ground up for a rural mountain town.
The economics
A model built to pay for itself.
Bringing two operations under one roof isn’t only kinder—it’s cheaper to run. Early modeling projects meaningful annual savings from shared facilities, bulk purchasing, coordinated transportation, and consolidated administration, on top of the donated time of hundreds of volunteers.
Figures are early projections drawn from comparable co-located models, and will be refined as the campus is designed.
Funding comes from a deliberate mix—program fees on a sliding scale, government and foundation grants, corporate sponsorships, individual giving, revenue-generating services, and ClearPath’s own profits—with no single source ever carrying more than its share.
Be part of it
It takes a community to build one.
For organizations
Your expertise, your space, or your sponsorship can help lay the foundation. The organizations that step in early will be remembered as the ones who reinvented community care in rural America.
For individuals
An hour of your time may be the highlight of an isolated senior’s week. A gift of any size plants something that grows. Your voice changes how a whole town thinks about aging and childhood.
For churches
Your community already understands the sacred value of generations caring for one another. Open your space as a learning hub and let your congregation live that value seven days a week, not one.
A vision worth building
Walk through the doors, five years from now.
Morning sun fills the garden as a 92-year-old with arthritis-curved fingers shows a four-year-old how to pick a tomato without bruising it—their Tuesday ritual, and the best part of both their weeks. In the technology hub, a retired engineer who once felt obsolete mentors a room of women writing their first lines of code. In the dining hall, an elder who used to eat alone is surrounded by children begging for one more story about the old days.
None of this is a dream. It’s a blueprint—and it’s what a deliberate share of every ClearPath sale is being built to pay for.
A community where no one is invisible, where wisdom is treasured and children are nurtured, and where the distance we’ve put between the generations finally begins to close.