EngAGE Stories

EngAGE is pleased to announce the addition of Keren Brown Wilson to our esteemed Board of Directors. You can see the entire list of dedicated members here.

Keren Brown Wilson, President, Jessie F. Richardson Foundation – Dr. Wilson has over 30 years experience in long-term care and supportive housing. She was the principal architect of the Oregon model of assisted living and worked with policymakers in other states looking to replicate it.

She founded three assisted living companies, providing development and management services to over 200 projects in numerous states with a focus on the poor and very poor. She has a broad range of academic and professional expertise, including regulatory analysis, day-to-day operations, and policy development. She has knowledge of both for profit and nonprofit assisted living and has worked with numerous funding sources that include Medicaid, tax credit, state revenue bonds, HUD, and community re-development programs. Keren is a recognized expert on risk and liability management.

Her doctorate degree in Urban Studies is from Portland State University. Keren holds an Adjunct Professor position with Portland State University’s Institute on Aging. She has served as an advisor to numerous states, the Pan American Health Organization, Canada, and China on housing, assisted living, and long term-care.

Currently, Keren is President of the Jessie F. Richardson Foundation, a charitable organization working on housing and service issues for very low income and hard-to-serve elders in both the United States and Central America. She also serves on several local and national boards.

You can learn more about Dr. Wilson in Atul Gawande’s important book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, in which an entire chapter is devoted to her. In a review of the book entitled, “7 Things I Learned from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal,” writer Ellen Wehle notes: “The next time you hear someone moaning that one person can’t change the world, tell them about Keren Brown Wilson. When Wilson was a teenager, her mother suffered a debilitating stroke and had to enter a nursing home. She hated it, begging ‘Take me home’ at the end of every visit. What her mother wanted, Wilson says, was a place where she could ‘lock her door, control her heat…where she would be a person living in an apartment instead of a patient in a bed.’ Years later, after earning her degree in social policy, Wilson began drawing up blueprints for just such a place, and the first assisted living facility opened in 1983. Now they’re all over the world—including Philadelphia, where my own father happily controls his heat, keeping his room subtropical.”