A Q&A with Pennsylvania Secretary of Aging Jason Kavulich

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Aging Jason Kavulich is a 25-year veteran of the sector, having previously directed the Lackawanna County Area Agency on Aging and the PA Association of Area Agencies on Aging. In his current role, Kavulich is spearheading Gov. Josh Shapiro’s ambitious rethinking of the state’s approach to elder services – the centerpiece of which is a 10-year strategic plan, “Aging Our Way,” which launched in May 2024.

What are the biggest shifts you’ve seen in the aging space?

Our space is huge – age 60 to the end of life is a big part of a person's existence. And people 85-plus are a different generation, with different wants and needs from those in their early sixties.

Younger seniors’ needs are much more complicated. You see very different populations, and this change means that the cases are much more complex than they were 10 years ago.

We’re touching on the behavioral health space, physical health issues, challenges with addiction – things that we have not necessarily seen a lot of in aging services, but are becoming more prevalent now. We have a greater increase in grandparents raising grandchildren, a lot of which has to do with opioids and other drugs. The needs are more drastic, and we need to be able to broaden our services.

Can the state budget keep up with growing needs?

We’re the fifth-oldest state in the nation. One in four Pennsylvanians is a senior – we’re quickly moving to one in three. It’s our fastest-growing demographic; in certain areas, we’ve seen a 22% increase in our population in the last 10 years. Yet the funding for aging services has only grown 2.5%.

So this year, the request is $20 million in the state budget to stabilize the Area Agencies on Aging, another investment in Aging Our Way, and an investment in the department infrastructure – because we have not grown in all that time, despite the fact that we’re serving more, and the expectations of our department have increased.

Those requests total a $25 million investment to serve all the various needs of 3.4 million older Pennsylvanians – everything from ombudsmen to protective services, transportation, home services, housing – which is an incredible struggle for older adults.

How is “Aging Our Way” going?

Our work this first year of the program concentrated on caregivers. They are the backbone of our system, and the millions of dollars that they save the system by being unpaid caregivers is tremendous.

So we built our Caregiver Toolkit. It’s an online interaction that asks a series of questions to help connect you to what you need – accessing food resources, finding respite for the person they’re caring for, finding a support group for themselves. It’s comprehensive, easy to use and offered in almost every language, and there’s technical assistance, because not everybody’s tech-savvy.

We’ve built out a more robust system of legal support for grandparents raising grandchildren – services that are trauma- and evidence-informed. We’re reframing senior centers to be much more engaged – not just places for bingo and meals.

We’re in the final stages of testing with our caregivers, and we launch the Toolkit in June.

The commonwealth recently launched its first office devoted to Alzheimer’s and other dementias. What do you hope to accomplish with it?

It’s about bringing everyone to the table – working with the Department of Health, the Alzheimer’s Foundation … and stakeholders from across the commonwealth, to do the best we can for this population. We need to do better work around Alzheimer’s in rural and in African American communities … and reinvent Alzheimer’s planning for a more modern time. No single department has the bandwidth to do that.

The first year has included programs around awareness and early detection. We also have some projects going on around dementia-friendly communities and physician education.

What keeps you motivated?

For the first time in a decade, we’ve changed systems for the better. Look at our website today: You’ll see information that has never been shared before with the public – it’s transparent, in easy-to-understand language.

We’re proud to be the voice for older Pennsylvanians. Their rights need to be upheld, they need to be given the dignity that they deserve. Because we owe it all to them.