Board Members
Bruce Lawler, Board Chair
Louis Tenenbaum, Vice President
Christina E. Wasch, Vice President
William K. Wasch, Secretary/ Treasurer
Bruce Lawler
Bruce Lawler has been helping seniors for over twenty-seven years remain safely and happily in their homes. He served as manager of Adapt Your Home, a Hamden, CT company specializing in home modifications for seniors from 1988-1991. In 1992, he started his own company which built the award-winning accessible Middletown House. In 1998 he was the consultant for an ABC Good Morning America segment on home modifications for seniors and in 2004 he was featured in the PBS episode of “Seniors Living a Quality Life.” Currently, Bruce is the president of Lawler & Sons LLC – A Design and Construction Company for Independent Living and he is the Director of Household Services for HomeHaven – A New Haven based organization devoted to helping seniors grow older in the comfort of their own homes. Bruce is CAPS certified and he has worked with and has been invited to speak to many organizations thru the years including local VNA and Alzheimer groups. His passion for helping seniors remain in their homes is easily recognizable.
Louis Tenenbaum
Louis Tenenbaum is a recognized innovator in senior living ideas. He is an advocate for new ideas in senior living and technology including Universal Design, Telemedicine and Assistive Technologies. Adopting these technologies will increase management and development efficiencies while improving quality of life and preserving privacy across the range of senior living environments including homecare, assisted living, nursing homes and CCRCs. Benefits will include better use of scarce labor through passive and active remote monitoring, less injuries and better employee retention through safer ergonomics, prolonged independence through assistive technology and space savings per resident through better design.
Tenenbaum is President of Access Remodeling, an Independent Living Strategy firm in the Washington, D. C. area working with individuals and families, health and aging professionals and developers to choose design and equipment that facilitates independent living. Louis was named to Remodeling Magazine’s “Big 50” list of Remodelers in 1998. In 2001 Tenenbaum was contracted by Rebuilding Together with Christmas in April to conduct workshops in home modification throughout the country under grant to the Administration on Aging. He has spoken at many State, University, association and industry conferences as well as consulting with developers, agencies and non-profits on a wide range of senior living issues.
Tenenbaum received his B. A. degree in Geography from the University of Michigan. Louis is s member of numerous associations and panels including the Jewish Council for the Aging, National Council on Senior Housing, National Association of the Remodeling Industry, National Home Modification Action Coalition, American Society on Aging, National Council on Aging, Grass Roots Organization for the Well-Being of Seniors, and Spinal Cord Injury Network.
Christina E. Wasch
Christina E. Wasch, a resident of Amherst, MA, is a graduate of Hampshire College and has a Master of Architecture degree from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the designer of the award winning Middletown House, featured on this web site and has had over ten years of practical architecture experience primarily with single family houses. She was a member of the architectural design and production team for institutional renovation and restoration projects at Noyes-Vogt Architects in Guilford CT from 1989-1990. After graduating from MIT in 1994 she worked for Charles R. Myer in Cambridge MA on new construction and remodeling projects for single family houses.
She won an internship from The National Trust for Historic Preservation and Yankee Magazine to research historic domestic architecture and write and illustrate guidelines for design appropriateness and protection of Glastonbury, CT’s Historic District. For two summers she was selected by MIT to work on a proposal for a market area in Beijing, China and on a planning project for residents of a cooperative housing estate in Lublin, Poland. While at MIT she served as a teaching assistant in the design studio. She has given slide presentations on accessibility issues at annual conferences of The Gerontological Society of America, The National Council on the Aging and the American Society on Aging as well as at international conferences on aging in Jerusalem, Israel, Montreal, Canada, and Durban, South Africa.
A practitioner of English and Scottish Country dancing, she has served on the Board of Boston’s Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. She is also one of the founders and former Board member of AASEI, an American non-profit organization which sends American and Russian college students on summer research projects at Russian scientific nature reserves.
William K. Wasch
William K. Wasch, nationally recognized author of Home Planning for Your Later Years, designed and built with his daughter, Architect Christina E. Wasch, the first of –its- kind, Middletown House, a completely accessible house for older persons. The house design won The 1999 Best of Seniors’ Housing Award sponsored by The National Association of Home Builders. Wasch, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University with an MS in business degree from The Columbia Graduate School of Business has had a wide ranging career in elderly services. His professional interests cover social service services for frail elderly, older worker training and recruiting programs, accessibility of federally funded senior housing, and most recently the development of the Adapt Your Home Program and the Senior Serve company to allow disabled and frail older people to remain in their own home as long as possible.
His slide presentations on home accessibility have been standard features at the annual conferences of all the major national professional associations working to help enrich the lives of older people throughout the country. Wasch is a board and executive committee member of The National Council of Aging, Inc and was Chair of its 1996 Annual Conference. He also serves on the Board of The Seabury Retirement Community in Bloomfield, CT and recently completed a three year term on the board of Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
His work has been featured live on major television networks as well as on a variety of local radio stations and features in publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, and Business Week. He also served as a CT delegate to the 1995 White House Conference on Aging and has served over twelve years as Chair of his hometown’s Senior Affairs Commission.