Introducing Common Ground Care (for Dementia and Parkinson’s):
Every senior home care agency will tell you their caregivers are trained in Dementia and Parkinson’s care. Most of them are telling the truth. What they usually leave out is who is actually walking through the door.
At Seniors Helping Seniors® South Bay, we built something different: Common Ground Care, our specialized training and support program for families managing dementia and Parkinson’s disease. It combines the clinical rigor families expect with the one thing no certification can teach: a caregiver who has actually lived a version of your story.
Why We Built This
Dementia and Parkinson’s are two of the most common reasons South Bay families call us. Both are progressive. Both change the shape of a household over months and years, not days. And both require a caregiver who can do far more than complete tasks on a checklist.
Families researching home care will find plenty of well-built programs out there, memory care curricula backed by national dementia associations, Parkinson’s training developed alongside movement disorder specialists. We studied them. We kept what works. Then we asked a harder question: what would make this program actually ours?
The answer was staring at us from our own name.
What Makes Common Ground Care Different
1. Peer-matched caregivers, not just certified ones. Most agencies pair a trained caregiver with a client and hope for rapport. We start from rapport. Our caregivers are seniors themselves, often within a decade or two of the client’s age. That means a caregiver working with someone in early-stage dementia may have watched a spouse go through the same thing. A caregiver supporting a Parkinson’s client may understand tremor and fatigue from their own joints, not just from a training module. The clinical training is the same caliber you’d expect from any specialized program. The difference is who is delivering it, and how naturally a client opens up to someone who shares their generation instead of their grandchildren’s.
2. A living care plan, not a binder you get once. A lot of dementia and Parkinson’s “programs” hand you a care plan at intake and revisit it at the annual review. Both conditions do not wait a year to change. Common Ground Care plans are built to be adjusted as often as the disease requires, with our South Bay care team reviewing caregiver observations on a regular cadence and updating the plan in real time, not just when a crisis forces the issue.
3. Owner-led and locally accountable. Common Ground Care is not run out of a call center in another state. It is overseen by the same South Bay team a family already knows: Matt Solomon and Julie Dwyer are directly involved in how these care plans are built and adjusted. When something needs to change, families are talking to the people who can actually change it, the same day.
The Two Tracks
Common Ground Care: Memory Support Built for families navigating Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Caregivers are trained to focus on what a client can still do, not just what has been lost, using techniques drawn from leading dementia-care frameworks and adapted through the lens of peer connection: shared routines, familiar reference points, and communication built on relating, not managing.
Common Ground Care: Movement Support Built for families navigating Parkinson’s disease. Caregivers are trained to recognize and respond to both the motor symptoms (mobility, balance, tremor) and the non-motor symptoms (mood, cognition, sleep) that make Parkinson’s care so different from general home care. Because our caregivers understand the physical reality of aging firsthand, they bring patience and pacing that is hard to fake.
What This Means for Your Family
If you are caring for a loved one with dementia or Parkinson’s, you already know the hardest part is not any single task. It is the slow redefinition of what a normal day looks like, for them and for you. Common Ground Care exists to make sure the person helping you through that redefinition actually understands it, because they are living something close to it themselves.
If you would like to talk through what a Common Ground Care plan could look like for your family, reach out to Seniors Helping Seniors® South Bay. We are local, we are hands-on, and we would be glad to help.