Editor’s Note: McKnight’s Senior Living, McKnight’s Long-Term Care News and McKnight’s Home Care are profiling the McKnight’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards honorees daily in April and May. For additional McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards content, visit this page.
If you call your retirement community a “life plan community,” you might have Mary Leary to thank.
Mather, then known as Mather Lifeways, worked with LeadingAge to gather feedback from industry leaders, residents and prospective residents to come up with a new name for continuing care retirement community when research revealed that the words “continuing care” evoked a setting where older adults were cared for rather than a setting that also fostered growth and new experiences. The new name was announced in 2015.
In addition to transforming Mather into an incubator for senior living innovations, Leary has mastered the art of pushing back on perceptions of aging by changing the nomenclature.
Leary, Mather’s president and CEO, gave an assist, too, in turning the “personal care” of the 1980s into the “assisted living” we know today.
Those are just some of the reasons she was selected as a winner by an independent national panel of experts in the “Agent of Change” category in the inaugural McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program.
Leary, who joined the not-for-profit Mather in 2002, started her career in multifamily development. She shifted her focus to an aging population just before joining Mather, when she served as chief operating officer of Classic Residence by Hyatt, the senior living affiliate of the Hyatt Corp. that was renamed Vi Living.
While leading Mather, Leary has overseen the company’s development of a new high-rise life plan community just outside Washington, DC, dubbed The Mather Tysons; a company rebranding; and continuing research into senior living trends through the Mather Institute.
The company has produced numerous research studies that it applies to its practices, including Mather’s national Wellness Trends Report and national longitudinal Age Well Study. It’s part of Leary and Mather’s effort of giving back, sharing research results far and wide.
It’s the same spirit of collaboration that’s the foundation for another of Leary’s innovative ideas: Novare, the national consortium of small-system life plan community providers in non-competing areas, which she started and now chairs.
The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Senior Living, McKnight’s Long-Term Care News and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized at an awards dinner and ceremony March 7 in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a silver sponsor; and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.
