How Namrata Bagaria reduces senior loneliness and isolation through virtual programming

Terrence Wang (Welbi)   00:00

You're listening to Care, the Resident Experience podcast from Welbi. Every month we chat with some of the best leaders in senior living to discover and share innovative strategies and perspectives that will impact communities for years to come. This week we're chatting with Namrata Bagaria, founder and CEO of Seniors Junction, which provides virtual learning circles to reduce social isolation in senior living communities. Nam. How are you doing this morning?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   00:26

I'm excellent, how are you?

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   00:28

I'm doing well, definitely very busy, but nowadays that is a good thing.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   00:34

Yes.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   00:34

How have you been with Seniors Junction?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   00:36

Well Seniors Junction has been well. I think there's a lot of traction that we got because of doing a lot of podcasting and a lot of piloting. And at the stage where we are, we are just looking inwards and redoing a few pieces because now we are in a hybrid world. When we started, it was completely virtual. So we also have to make sure the services match the environment while focusing on what's our expertise, which is virtual programming.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   01:05

And when you talk about virtual learning circles, how did you get there and what's the story behind that?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   01:10

Sure. So, 2020 December, my father was in the hospital for two months. He was chronically ill and being in the ICU, he was isolated, right? So the only time we could talk to him was 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening with the video call. And he was quite isolated and then he passed away. A lot of the time you might get the best care, but if you're isolated, your health doesn't always respond to treatment. And then after he passed away, my mother had a lot of loss of purpose because she was a caregiver for so many years. Around the same time, my co-founder and I have been really good friends since many years, and he lost his wife five years ago to cancer. So in the pandemic we were supporting each other— I live by myself and he lives by himself— by a daily fixed time check-in and calling. It was really a good support system for us and we would do activities together online. So we decided, well, this is a real problem. I had noticed that when I used to do virtual exercises, and that was another parallel happening, I was doing online workouts so that I don't gain more weight sitting at home.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   02:27

I did gain towards the third lockdown, but the first one I was pretty good. So I had a lot of women join me and they were mostly women in their 70s or something. Because I had emailed some friends, do you want to join? And they emailed their friends. So with these three data points, my co-founder's journey, my personal journey, and these women. And these women I'm like, why are you coming for online workouts? Like a question. They're like, because we get lonely in the evening, and this is the best way to do it. We can see each other and we can talk and exercise. So I suddenly realize they're not exercising for fitness, they're exercising for isolation and loneliness and all this combined, and given my background is in digital transformation. Since 2010, I've been working on digital health and I'm doing a PhD at uOttawa. All this combines, the multiple factors which made me believe that this is the right path for me. And then I did a little bit of market research. You go talk to people, like, go to the park whenever the lockdown would be open, go to the park, check out a few senior living.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   03:29

And then I really found that there is a big engagement gap. There is a big, big gap. And isolation is real, it's not imaginary. It's also there for people who live in high end senior living. It's not just for people who are living at home. So when there's a market, when the timing is right, the product can easily be made and delivered. So that's it. I was at the right place at the right time, with the right idea and with personal suffering.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   03:54

Yeah. That's awesome how you're able to turn your own personal story and the personal story of your co-founder and the people you met into something really powerful for other people. It definitely feels like that's a big undertaking, though, jumping into this and providing virtual connections for people. What was the biggest struggle you felt early on?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   04:15

Well, it's an ongoing struggle. I would say struggle has phases, right? So the first part of your struggle is your own conviction. So when we started, we were not sure what to give. Do you want to make them exercise? Do you want them to just talk to each other? And then we suddenly realized that it's not one size fits all, like different strokes for different folks. What makes me connected is not what makes you connected. So we realize it has to be definitely a variety. The variety is a non negotiable. Even if you do exercise, the variety is a non negotiable, which may not be the case for the younger population, which might want to just do excellence. They want to just do one thing and keep getting better and better and better. This demographic is looking for a spread of interests. Some of them just want to get an expertise in, let's say, some yoga or running or whatever. But that's very few.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   05:09

Yeah.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   05:10

So the earliest struggle was getting the value proposition right, and from being from a scientific background, like, I'm very data-driven, evidence-based, and then because I've worked ten years in the community, I'm also very empathy-based. So I've combined empathy and evidence. And today, after 50 podcasts of our own podcast, after talking to many, many seniors across all age groups within Canada and some in the US, I think what we are offering is what is the right fit for the market, not what we think is right. And the ongoing struggle is definitely digital onboarding because whenever you interview, you're getting the early adopters and that's not always easy to find. They're spread out and the ones who are congregate living are not as digitally onboarded because the age range is a little on the higher side. And so we've seen those kinds of things. So it's like getting the substantial volume for the business at the cost of acquisition, which is digestible for a small company like ours. I think that's my biggest challenge, right?

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   06:19

100%. And I think we feel the same challenges, right. It's always bridging the gap between early adopters, which are maybe 10% of the whole population as a whole and they're spread around everywhere. But to really succeed as a company, you need to target, and I think your product and service needs to work for, I think the 70% right in the middle, right?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   06:39

Yeah.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   06:40

The type that aren't adopters or laggards in any type of way. So what are the strategies you've been doing to combat that from a digital transformation side? Because it's something that I think a lot of senior communities, not necessarily struggle with, but are looking at combating in the next coming years.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   06:57

Yeah, I would say these are the basic three golden rules, I think, for digital transformation, whether it's healthcare or senior living. Now, mind you, I am new in senior living. Let's say a year and a half or two, right? But my entire career has been in health and I see a lot of problems with how healthcare was in the 90s. This is where senior living is now. So it's almost like you can go back and borrow a lot of lessons. So I think the first thing for any digital transformation is what is your appetite for change management at a managerial level, at an individual level? Because essentially I can give you VR, I can give you anything. But how do you integrate that in someone's existing workflow? So that's the first thing. What's your change management appetite, culture, skills? If you don't understand how resistant staff is or how interested they are but the management is not. So even though you're an external vendor, you want to get affected by the dynamic at play within the organization. So that's the first thing. The second thing is really understanding the stakeholders because the buyers, the ones who are paying the bill, are not the users and there are different influences which affect the purchase.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   08:14

So, for example, in senior living, let's say you speak to an activity director and they are on board, but let's say their management is not entirely sure they want to give money for this. What is the way you can go? Can you give a blog for a newsletter? And can seniors pay out of their own pockets? Now, if it's a high end senior living where seniors are at a certain economic level, they would definitely not mind it, and sometimes it’s the caregivers or the children of the seniors who are ready to do so. Cracking the sales in this business is hard. If you're selling seniors to seniors, they do a lot of peer to peer buying, but those are the younger seniors. Then again, they are not congregated. They are living in their own home, right? So it's hard work. What we have done so far to resolve it is we've started partnering with other electronic health record, personal health record companies who’ve started and now they’re diversifying into the marketplace. So through that we get access to their communities and then we pay a flat fee for the cost of customer acquisition. And the third part is relationship building, because at the end of the day we as vendors will be more successful if we have relationships not just with their It departments, if they have them firstly, but with activity people.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   09:31

And also we need some champion seniors because you need to understand activity folks work nine to five. So there's a gap in the programming. We nuanced it and we offer evening programming. We don't offer much in the day, afternoon, maybe late afternoons. We try to complement the offerings so that we have less barrier to say oh, we're already giving them something in the morning, we don't need Seniors Junction. So we really narrowed how we offer, trying to be very pitch perfect. And for the seniors who live at home, I think many people have daytime activities like going to the creation centers or just even going for a walk. Typically we've noticed evening is when loneliness hits. So this is not isolation, this is loneliness. And those are the people who are, some of them are ready to come online. So even for us, like understanding, who is this customer, is this person isolated or is this person just lonely or is this person just proactive than either of the two? And right now though we wanted to tackle isolation, we're actually catering to more proactive people and they are the only adopters.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   10:36

Well, that's the thing, right? And I think our team wrote an article about this the other week. But the difference between isolation and loneliness is quite profound, right? In terms of the effect on people with this, isolation has its own detractors. But loneliness is much more, you don't have to necessarily be physically isolated to feel lonely.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   10:57

Right.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   10:58

That is key. That's really interesting. The point that you bring up though about activity directors and activity managers kind of working with our operations teams. Why do you think recreation is continually underfunded?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   11:10

Well, luckily this question, I thought about it well. So you need to understand the two functions of recreation in my personal opinion. One is, and this is what I have noticed, one is let's say there is a family member or a senior who decides to move in, let’s say to senior housing. And the first thing that they are introduced to is, look at our community, we have this activity and we do this. So recreation is used as a pitch for selling units. Now, the second thing is, if you look at who pays, senior housing was created essentially— not senior housing, I would say long term care was created as an extension of health care. So the mental model is the medical model that we give you care 24 by 7. There's nothing about engagement. There is research which shows a senior in a long term care or nursing home or assisted living, not independent living, on an average, only has 35 to 36 minutes of engagement in a day. So someone talks to you half an hour in a day— that does not talk, probably, they're fixing your diaper, they're changing you, they're feeding you or doing whatever, helping you with things.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   12:23

That's very low engagement, right? And I know that because my father was in the ICU for two months, and I know exactly when he was engaged, right? I understand that. The second part that it comes to is you need to understand the people who become at the management level are mostly people with finance backgrounds. Their target is housing occupancy. Their target is not customer engagement. And also, given that their customers today, only 5% to 15% even have their own email address, the demand for engagement is more in-person. So what happens is you can get away with all this saying, okay, we'll give them some activities. Recreation teams, they have a very high turnover. The actual teams are paid minimum wage or just above minimum wage. Right. So it's not even sustainable financially. And so for me, this goes back to the argument of why hospitals don't care or fund nursing enough, where, you know, nurses are the drivers. There's also a power play. There's a power play the way you have in hospitals. There's a different salary for physicians versus the other staffing, which are actually running a hospital. Because I come from a healthcare background, this is how I would put it.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   13:45

And unless and until the culture shifts to patient-centered care, and here it becomes resident engagement because you're promising them, this is your new home. Your new home is not a hotel. You don't need fancy chandeliers. The thing is those chandeliers and the staffing from hospitality comes because the idea is, I need to sell this unit. That's what's going to get me my bottom line. Resident engagement doesn't show them their bottom line. And the second is there is not enough good research which clearly shows them, by engaging residents, you can reduce the amount of care they need because their health will be better. They might need less, they might get less aggravated, will need less of the nursing attention and all that. If you can show a clear cost savings analysis that by doing an hour of virtual programming, you save 15 hours of nursing care per resident per month. Then there is an argument. So it's all about the money, honey. It's that kind of a thing.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   14:50

100%. And I think we see that a lot as well, right, where people try to find the bottom line for it. It's something that I know the ICAA has looked into down in the US. A couple of other notable organizations have looked into it. But it's clear in your head there is that connection, right?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   15:14

It’s common sense, right? Research says that social isolation is more harmful than obesity and as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, right? So if that's the research, the thing is you've not put a number and you've not amplified a number. I read another paper which said that if you, I think it said that doing digital senior programming — and this was a study by Linked Seniors — and I would say digital does not mean everything a part of your program is digital, right? Because you need high touch points for seniors and even for human beings like you and I, if we work two years virtually all the time, it was insane. When I say virtual programming is to fit in a gap in your service, right? So it says that by doing good digital programming, every senior community can save up to $20,000 per building per year. Now, I don't know where that number came from. I didn't understand it, but there are attempts to quantify it as a financial case. This almost goes back to like, earlier in my career, I was doing employee wellness. And then you really had to explain to people what employee burnouts can cause, now with the Great Resignation, people understand it.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   16:36

So I think there needs to be a little bit of a vision. And I think the second part is, even if you look at, what does the senior housing promise in advertisements? It says we will personalize your lifestyle as you want. But they're not delivering a personal lifestyle. They're just doing community stuff, right? You do whatever activities are available, whether it's a Bible group or a bingo or a birthday. Those are more casual entertainment. There are some that have resident-driven book clubs, but there's very few deeper engagement. So is engagement bingo or is engagement five of them reading a book together or creating a project together? So it really depends on how you are defining it. Because if you're telling people, we'll help you find the purpose of your life, sorry, every one of them is falling short of that, and mainly because they are understaffed. And so if that's the case, then the best way is to partner with a third party vendor which can provide those services and then create the business deal from there.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   17:40

And I think it comes down to one, the staff to actually provide the programs. We see it all the time. Like, you want to run programs morning, afternoon, evening, weekends, but you just have to make that choice. Right? It's not, I can do everything, it's, I have this much budget and I either get to pick morning programs or I get to pick evening programs. So that's one of the tough sectors. The other tough part is just the understanding, which I think you brought up really well. On the engagement, it's different for every single community. And for a specific community with 50 or 60 people, engagement means a completely different thing than another community, even like three blocks away.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   18:17

Exactly. Yeah. I think the size of the senior housing also poses a challenge to their innovation quotient. So if you see the biggest change in the country, whether here or in the US. They don't have WiFi across all their properties. It doesn't work. There's WiFi, maybe in some rooms. Very weak signals. I can't even record a podcast with any activity person if they're on site. So I have to record the podcast when they're at their own home. Two years post-pandemic, they still don't have WiFi. I mean, most seniors did use online calling or calls to talk to their family members. And so this is the basic digital divide. Today the internet is almost, so I'm not sure if it's already been said, but it's almost like a basic human right. And digital inclusion is a social determinant of health, that is a legit thing because that I read recently, so I can tell you, digital inclusion is a social determinant of health. So you're basically— you need to upgrade what health care services mean. You need to develop the vision. Once you come into our community, guess what? You're going to make friends, and we're going to teach you how to use computers so that you can find new things to do. Because, hey, you're charging them like bomb.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   19:29

Yeah.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   19:31

So I think that's where it is. And it needs a little bit of a dialogue, a little bit of understanding that the generation that they have today are veterans or seniors from the World War II generation. The next generation is Boomers, and the next is Gen X, which is almost getting towards 65 in a few years. They are more individualistic. You can do group programming, community programming, and get away with it. You need to also understand customer dynamics. As millennials age, there would be a different kind of senior housing. It probably wouldn't be congregated. It would be getting services at your home as you like it, because the level of customization different generations are used to is very different. So you can’t do the service fairly if you're not thinking ahead.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   20:21

And that's really interesting. I don't think any other industry really deals with this where they know they can see their customers change over time and they can see how it's going to change over time. You could literally look at 35 year olds right now and be like, okay, in 40 years they are going to be the majority of our residents, right? So we need to move our infrastructure and our services towards something that really supports them.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   20:45

Yeah, the way you have how old data centers were there? You had those big buyers and things like that, and people would go and work in Internet cafes and eventually it became decentralized. In my opinion, senior housing, senior engagement is going to be decentralized. The good big brands will start acquiring companies which can deliver in-home. So I think that's the way as a business, because if you're good at something, you're not going to start doing something you're not even having any idea about. Like mostly I remember we did a Clubhouse summit. I had to train every person how to use Clubhouse first. So I had set up 20 minutes or 15-20 minutes aside. Okay, join the room, come out, raise your hand. Right? And I knew that because as a person who's done digital transformation from 2010, I understand that training and capacity building is very important, even as vendors. So even though we provide virtual learning circles, we have to still give turnkey solutions or handhold them to get there. Because let's say they'll tell us, okay, we have a TV and can you do your virtual learning circles? Maybe, but I need your TV to have a conferencing system.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   21:51

Because if some senior is talking to us, we do live discussions, we can't hear them and then they'll say, oh, Zoom doesn't work. Well, Zoom doesn't work because you're not using a Zoom room, you're using a flat TV, but just throwing content. So that's not live engagement. Yeah, and sure, you can show recorded TV and recorded stuff, and there are many companies which do that. So also we need to assess as Seniors Junction, we assess whether this community is ready for us or not.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   22:16

And that's really interesting when you bring that up, because I've seen a number of pretty high profile companies that are really focusing on recorded content or TV content as a form of engagement. I think that's really important, right? Like somebody might be up at five in the morning or at 11:00 p.m. when it just really isn't feasible to provide live engagement, right? Or you just want to be with yourself and you just want to consume some content. Like we all have that where we need to go watch something or read something.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   22:46

Streaming is a very strong business in this community. There are businesses which have, let's say, dementia-friendly content, or hearing-friendly content or visual-friendly content. So depending, there's so much customisation available and because their mandate is, let's say entertainment or edutainment or whatever, my mandate is isolation and loneliness, right? So my mandate is if I tell you, Terry, okay, you're so lonely, why don't you listen to a podcast? It's not going to help you. You'll be like, it doesn't help. Right?

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   23:17

It doesn't.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   23:17

So you need to also go back to what your business is trying to solve. Of course, we have to also educate the community. So we are also thinking of what it is, how it is. So even from our side, there has to be a lot of investment in social marketing, education from top to bottom. So we do that through our different summits, through the podcast. But everything has to come down to express points because you need to understand these guys are understaffed, overbooked. You can't keep engaging them beyond the point. And then you also, at the same time, you have to start building the capacity of seniors themselves. So it's not an easy task. I think as a business, you need to be focused. What is your delivery? For me, if someday Seniors Junction grows to the level that we have round the clock programming and your global company? Because say it’s 11:00 PM in Canada. Let's say I'm from India. It's morning in India, right? So if you're doing global programming, it doesn't matter, you can just join anywhere. But for that to happen, the senior needs to have their own device which has internet, and that they know how to use. That digital inclusion is not there yet.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   24:26

Either they have the devices, and one of our podcast interviews said that they had a staff which actually had to go around charging people's devices because they forgot to charge it. So even simple things like charging your device, we have a long milestone. But if you set a vision and you work with senior housing as your partners and understand their pain points and engage with them and understand that change management is a slow process. As a business, while they are your biggest potential customer, they're not your immediate customers. You have to get money from somewhere else.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   25:02

And those are all challenges I think we're all dealing with, and I think the communities themselves are dealing with. Right? Like there's so many infrastructure improvements that you see from high profile communities all the way down to single home groups of whether it's Internet infrastructure or improved facilities. And it's something that needs to happen in the next 10-20 years, for sure. I think that leads off pretty well into our last little piece, which is where you think recreation is going, and I think you mentioned already that it's going to be decentralized, but when do you think that's going to happen?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   25:35

Well, as the customer demand increases, industry is always reactive. It's not proactive, at least in this industry, which means till the time you can’t get away with not giving it. Some industries have to be early adopters. Some industries, let's say if you're a tech company and if, let's say another company is introduced, we are shopping. You have to do it like tomorrow. Actually, you should have done it yesterday, but since you still have tomorrow, right, and then these industries, let's say healthcare, for example, look at healthcare. We still have fax machines in Canada, okay? And it still functions. They only decided to start using email services, I think under pandemic time. The funding for Telemedicine has slowly started being cut off again, and they're going back to the old system. Old habits die hard. You need to understand, they're not getting reimbursed for this. They get reimbursed for nursing care, so they get the nurses, they get reimbursed for occupancies, right? So you need to understand, where is the money coming from? Nobody's paying them to engage the residence or go digital. It's an expense for them. And unless that expense comes with a significant return on investment, which we vendors cannot at the moment prove, because we are also just getting in this space, then there is no point for them to do this. It's a matter of numbers. And they've already lost money because of lower occupancy for the past two years, or high staff turnover, COVID crisis management, PR, a lot of money in the PR for COVID and things like that. So I think it goes back to, well, if I'm not selling rooms, then the CEOs may lose their job. Listen, so they're not getting paid to engage them. They're getting paid for how many rooms they have occupied.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   27:16

For sure. And I think that'll be the biggest struggle in terms of resident engagement, how to connect that back to occupancy and to connect that back to wellness, right? Because you know that there is that link in your head, but figuring that out and quantifying that link will take time. And I think it's coming in the next five to ten years.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   27:35

It's there in academia. So my day job, I work at the university, and so academia and industry partnerships are crucial. I'm one of those researchers who tried that. I'm still an early stage researcher in my career. So while in ten years, you can see that there will be customized engagement, like, for example, yes, some people like bingo, so you give them bingo. But as men live longer, a lot of men like to do different kinds of activities. So you would need that kind of diversification. Some people are introverts. They don't want to do things with a group, but they're comfortable doing it digitally. So there are all kinds of people. Not everybody's social in the same way, and not everyone's isolated in the same way. And the senior staffing also comes with limited expertise, right? So they come with, let's say, a master's of some kind or a bachelor's in some kind of kinesiology or something. And that's one kind of engagement. Like what we have, we have retired professors, we have experts who talk to you on the topic that they work for 30-40 years, and now they're going to talk to you about it.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   28:40

So it's very different hearing from the horse's mouth. I would say almost like when you now go to a hospital, you'll see a hospital has a Netflix account or they have a TV and they've started accepting a certain quality of care parameters as bare standards. So I think as the standards get pushed when what you're doing is not enough and you're losing and people decide to stay more home. And as home care is getting stronger with tech innovation, like you can have a companion on demand now, you can have groceries on demand, you can have so many things on demand. When that shift starts significantly hurting the business, then you will see the difference coming in. So they have time.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   29:22

That's the thing that I think will shift people towards moving into communities, right? It is that engagement piece. Because if you can get all the rest, if you can get the care and you can get the service at home, then why would you move into this community that doesn't provide you anything? And then you have to leave the comfort of your home and you don't have this.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   29:40

Exactly.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   29:40

I think the leading communities are seeing that, especially in independent living where care is not as big. And then they realize, oh shoot, we need to invest into resident engagement.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   29:51

Most of them are shopping for vendors right now. So what happens from the vendor side? There's a very small difference between what one vendor does and the other, and if they don't articulate it well. So there are tons of online video programming, there's tons of engagement. It's not like us, it's not the only company. But then you need to see what parameters can they affect. If that's what your resident needs or your community needs. So there's also a big need to differentiate and report, generate and give feedback to individuals, to communities as a vendor, because that's where your impact lies. And if you can show that you are valued for the buck, you're going to be in business. And I also see a lot of services getting agglomerated, it's almost going to be like a consortium. I know we can’t serve everybody, but I know whom we can serve very well. So it'll become like one of those, let's say everybody doesn't listen to Spotify, right? Some people are happy with YouTube. So eventually you start differentiating. And since this is a new industry and we are not that ready to say why we are better than the others beyond some points, because we don't have enough numbers to prove that, like, I can say what I do, but that's me saying it.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   31:04

Well, hopefully you'll find a competitive advantage soon and you'll be able to differentiate it with just understanding. But as we're wrapping up, if somebody listening to this is interested in Seniors Junction and they do want to learn more, what's the best way to reach out to you? Where is the best place to learn more?

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   31:21

Sure, so Seniors Junction has a website called seniorsjunction.com and there is a contact form, so you can fill it up and it comes to my email and I definitely reply within ten minutes if I get it. I'm pretty fast, in case you don't hear, it's just that I was doing something else. But I'm very fast with emails. I'm very active on our social media. So if you want Seniors Junction, we have the same handle at Seniors Junction on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram and me personally, I have Namrata Bagaria. The thing is, I started digital a long time ago and at that time I never thought I would become a brand myself. So my handles are different on different platforms. Sorry for that, but you can go to my website namratabagaria.com. That's where I put everything in one place so it's easy to find.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   32:11

And I think it's a fantastic platform and it's a great idea. And it's extremely valuable for the communities at the end of the day to not just be solving boredom through activities, but also to solve loneliness and to address isolation.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   32:30

Well, the thing is, people lose purpose and if you solve these things, people will find purpose. We’ve created our own model for that, which is on our website. Communities can download that: how activities can lead to finding purpose again. But this is what you need. You need good health, you need a good purpose and a good set of friends who have the same likings as you. And that's how you get better. And I hope we can contribute to that.

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Terrence Wang (Welbi)   32:54

Thank you so much, Nam, for coming this morning, joining the podcast, and sharing with us everything you do. Hopefully we'll be in touch soon.

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Namrata Bagaria (Seniors Junction)   33:02

Sure, thank you.