On any given weekday morning at Elderday Adult Day Health Care, a Lift Line bus pulls up, and participants step down slowly, greeted by name.
Inside, nurses check vitals and medications, and a social worker confers quietly with a family member. Later, there will be movement therapy, music, cognitive exercises, art, nutritious meals, and deep conversation. Someone will sing. Someone will laugh unexpectedly. A caregiver back at home who hasn’t slept well in months will exhale, knowing their loved one is safe for the day.
Elderday is Community Bridges’ Community-Based Adult Services (CBAS) program and our counties only such programs. It blends skilled nursing care, therapeutic and social activities, nutritious meals, free transportation, and one-on-one care planning to make sure each person gets the right support. It also provides something less measurable but just as essential: respite for family caregivers and dignity for older adults who want to remain at home.
For nearly 13 years, Lois Sones has stood at the center of that daily choreography.
Under her leadership, Elderday has done what it was designed to do: keep people as well as possible for as long as possible. Elderday prevents unnecessary hospitalizations and early institutionalization, maintains people in their home and keeps people safe while helping to reduce caregiver depression and extend the time families can care for loved ones at home. It also offers structure, stimulation, and belonging to people living with dementia and those with complex medical conditions.
“Lois embodies the spirit of true collaboration and resilience. Together, we sustained this program following the Salud closure, the uncertainty of 2018, the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the ongoing challenges that followed—finding creative paths to keep doors open through reduced rent, thoughtful stewardship, and an unwavering commitment to those we serve,” said Community Bridges CEO Raymon Cancino. “Her willingness to grow, and partner in problem-solving has helped ensure this program not only endured but continues moving toward long-term sustainability for the older adults and our community who rely on it.”
But if you ask Lois what matters most, she will not start with metrics.
She will talk about singing.
“It’s an honor,” she says, “to be part of someone’s life journey—to learn their stories.”
As she prepares to retire in May, Lois leaves behind not just a program that works, but a philosophy of care rooted in curiosity, respect, and a lifelong belief that community is health.
Where Community Took Root
Lois grew up in East Los Angeles in a culturally mixed, vibrant neighborhood that shaped her before she knew it was shaping her.
She attended Buddhist temples with Japanese neighbors. She spent time in Jewish spaces. She accompanied Mexican friends to Catholic services. Difference was not something to fear or debate; it was simply life.
“It gave me such appreciation,” she recalls, “for different cultures, religions, ways of being in the world.”
In junior high, her family moved to a more suburban area of Los Angeles. The shift was stark. Her high school, as she recalls, had only one Black student. The diversity that had once felt natural was suddenly absent. Community, she realized, could disappear.
That early contrast planted something enduring: an awareness that belonging is both powerful and fragile and something that requires curation and willingness to work on.
She carried that awareness to UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s, where she enrolled in Community Studies during a period of social upheaval and intellectual energy. Though initially unsure of her path, she found herself drawn to how people thrive or falter within systems.
Financial realities forced her to leave before completing her degree, but the questions she was asking about environment, identity, and support would return to define her life’s work.
From Hospital Corridors to Respite Weekends
Lois’ professional life began, improbably, with a one-day temporary typing job at Children’s Hospital in Stanford.
She stayed—on and off—for 13 years.
She began as a secretary. Because she spoke Spanish—learned through family immersion and travel in Central America and deepened through years connected to Nicaraguan culture—she was soon asked to interpret. She became Children’s Hospital at Stanford’s first Spanish interpreter, bridging conversations between doctors and families navigating frightening diagnoses.
It was in those hospital corridors that Lois discovered social work.
She saw that medicine treated disease, but social workers treated the context: housing instability, family strain, fear, language barriers, grief. She returned to school at night to finish her bachelor’s degree at San José State, then earned her Master’s in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, eventually completing her clinical licensure (LCSW).
Her career included work at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and Stanford Children’s Hospital, including pediatric oncology with children facing leukemia and lymphoma, maternal and child health, adults with spinal cord injury, HIV, and dialysis care. The work was intense and emotionally exacting—for both her and her patients.
She later joined Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center as a family consultant, where her focus shifted to older adults and the family members caring for them. There, she began to grasp the invisible strain carried by caregivers, especially those supporting loved ones with dementia.
Working alongside Elderday’s founder, Majel Jordan, Lois helped develop “Respite Weekends,” twice-yearly programs where individuals with dementia were cared for over an entire weekend so their families could rest.
Those weekends were revelatory.
Caregivers arrived depleted. They left steadier, sometimes tearful with relief. Participants were not parked in chairs; they were engaged—singing, moving, reconnecting.
Lois remembers one husband who longed simply to hear his wife’s voice again. When a beloved song played, the woman began to sing. In that moment, Lois saw what she would come to believe deeply: dementia may alter memory, but it does not erase humanity.
After taking time to stay home during her daughter’s early years and helping start the family winery, Sones Cellars, Lois received encouragement from then-interim Elderday director Cheryl Bentley to apply for the program’s leadership role.
That was nearly 13 years ago.
She thought she might stay for three.
Why She Stayed — And Why It Matters Who Comes Next
In adult day services, care unfolds over time.
Elderday allows staff to truly know participants and families. You learn who they were before diagnosis. You meet the retired teacher, the farmworker, the engineer, the mother who still remembers every lyric to a song from 1965.
You see them dance. You see them thrive.
That continuity builds trust. It strengthens families. It stabilizes households that might otherwise unravel under the strain of caregiving. It gives underrepresented families access to high-quality, community-based care that honors culture, history, and dignity.
Lois did not just lead within these walls. She advocated across the field, serving for many years on the board of the California Association for Adult Day Services (CAADS) and as a commissioner for both the Santa Cruz County Seniors Commission and the In-Home Supportive Services Advisory Commission. She championed the adult day health model of care that keeps people home and strengthens the broader safety net for older adults statewide.
She believes fiercely that institutional care should not be the default, and that place and space can heal the soul.
Leading this program requires skill, steadiness, and heart. It calls for someone who values dignity over expediency, prevention over crisis response, and relationship over transaction. It is demanding work, but for the right person, it is also deeply fulfilling.
“It’s hard,” Lois says plainly. “But if being moved by human connection matters to you, it’s incredibly rewarding.”
Now, as she prepares for her next chapter, Elderday’s mission continues. The buses will still arrive each morning. The nurses will check in. The music will still play.
The opportunity ahead is clear: steward a program that keeps local families intact, supports older adults to remain in their homes, honors elders with compassion and respect, and strengthens the fabric of the Central Coast every single day.
And for someone who shares Lois’ values, there may be no more meaningful work.
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