Joon Bang: DC spends just 0.3% of its budget on its older residents. It’s time for a Dignity Fund.

People care. That’s what our social worker said after sharing her case notes on Ms. Rose, a new client referred to us by a local bank teller. 

Ms. Rose (a pseudonym) had returned to the bank multiple times over a week’s time, disoriented and struggling to remember basic information. “We’re all so worried about her,” the teller confided. 

Our staff at Iona Senior Services soon met with Ms. Rose, who carried an overstuffed handbag. Inside were past-due rent notices, an eviction notice, black-and-white photographs from her childhood, and an unopened can of beans.

For most of her career, she worked as an interpreter in the District, helping people with language barriers find their place in a new culture and their own version of the American Dream. 

We forget that language is more than words. Language is identity. Ms. Rose spent her life helping others find theirs. Now, in her 70s, she needs the same.

She is just one of many who do. In DC, nearly 4 in 10 older adults live alone. About 1 in 5 can’t reliably afford food, the highest rate of senior hunger in the nation. About 1 in 6 lives with dementia. Ms. Rose is not the exception. A demographic shift is underway, here and across the country. Some call it a “silver tsunami,” as if aging were a disaster bearing down on us. It isn’t. It’s us, all of us, if we’re fortunate enough to grow old.

But just as this need grows, the supports beneath us are being pulled away. Congress controls DC’s budget, and as federal layoffs drain its revenue, the District has begun pulling back, too. This year, the city cut Medicaid eligibility to the federal minimum, ending coverage for roughly 25,000 residents and shifting most to thinner plans. New federal work rules threaten food aid for another 17,000 people, including older adults now required to prove they work in order to eat. And in June, a Justice Department memo walked back a Supreme Court promise and decades of legal interpretation: that people with disabilities can live in their own communities, not be shut away. Each cut points in the same direction — away from home, toward crisis.

This is not the moment to pull back. It’s the moment to decide what kind of city we are, and to build something permanent for the people who spent their lives building the District: a Dignity Fund.

We wouldn’t have to invent it. Pennsylvania sends all its lottery proceeds to programs for older residents. Washington State, as of this month, helps working people afford long-term care with benefits funded through a payroll tax of as little as 0.58%. And Boston raised new money without a new tax, by asking the universities and hospitals that lean on the city to help hold it up. Three different tools. One decision: to purposefully fund what matters, and keep funding it.

DC can make the same choice, and it can fund the effort however it decides, whether from new revenue sources, as in those three examples, or by redirecting existing funds. What it can’t do is keep treating older residents as an afterthought. The agency serving them receives 0.3% of the city’s budget, even as their numbers grow faster than the city as a whole. A Dignity Fund would change that: a permanent, protected place in the budget for older Washingtonians, one that grows with the need and can’t be quietly cut when money runs short. The DC Council should create it and start funding it in the next budget.

Ms. Rose was found because a bank teller looked up from the counter, and a social worker took the time to see what she was carrying. People cared. But a city cannot depend on the right person happening to take notice at just the right moment. A Dignity Fund would enable us to ensure that those who have spent their lives caring for this city are cared for in return. Not by luck, but by choice.

Joon Bang is CEO of Iona Senior Services.

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