Female Citizen of the Year: Alicia Kleinert

Alicia Kleinert’s 12-year-old son, Caleb, noticed that seniors sometimes need help, and he made a point of that observation to his mom.

“He identified this gap where he saw seniors out alone, needing companionship, or just needing help with their groceries and just needing somebody to talk to.”

That was part of the impetus for Kleinert, who has years of experience in the health care field, to start MCA Adult Day Center at 1292 W. Station St. in Kankakee. The center opened in November after months of planning and prayer.

Being family oriented, Kleinert named the center after her three children — Madelyn, Caleb and Ameilia — the MCA of the center’s name.

“It really provides sort of the message of intergenerational care in connection,” Kleinert said. “They’re the co-founders of this as well, so it’s just myself and my children, and we’ve identified this need. We do a lot of community service in the area with seniors and with churches.”

MCA Adult Day Center offers care for seniors on a full- or part-time basis, offering the community an option as opposed to a assisted living facility or in-home service. It’s open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

“They can be here for the full day, or if they want to stay for a half a day, they can do that as well,” Kleinert said. “And we do offer drop-in services.

“We have an elderly couple, and one is usually the caregiver of the other. They have their own illnesses or appointments to the doctor. They can drop off their loved one here while they take care of that business. We do that as well for up to four hours.”

For her efforts to offer alternative care for seniors, Kleinert has been named the Daily Journal’s 2024 Female Citizen of the Year.

HOW IT STARTED

Kleinert, 39, is a self-described “late bloomer” after graduating from Kankakee High School in 2003 and entering the workforce as a certified nursing assistant for several years. She also started a family.

When she was 27, she went back to school earning associate degrees in respiratory therapy and general studies from Kankakee Community College.

She then earned a bachelor’s degree in leadership skills through an online program at the University of St. Francis in Joliet. Kleinert also earned a master’s degree in health administration from St. Francis.

While working on her bachelors degree she landed a job at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago in the neonatal intensive care unit for five years, commuting from her Chebanse home three days a week.

While working as an admissions coordinator at Riverside Medical Center during COVID, Kleinert identified a gap in a population of people who were being sent home due to insurance denial. The people being sent home needed supervision.

“Their loved ones had to bring them home, and yet they still had to work, or they just were not capable to attending to their needs,” she said. “So that’s where I started to really dive into this sort of population of people.”

Kleinert started researching and looking for a place to open the MCA Day Center. She worked with Kankakee Mayor Chris Curtis and Barbi Brewer-Watson, Kankakee’s Economic and Community Development Agency executive director.

“She’s the ultimate entrepreneur the way she went about it,” Curtis said.

Kleinert met with ECDA to get the business started and got the proper business documents in order. She put a business plan together. It’s the only adult day service available in Kankakee and Iroquois counties.

“I did have to educate myself on what business was,” she said. “Although I had the educational background, it still did not prepare me for opening a business. So I had to re-educate myself and become a student again.”

There were some sleepless nights and working until 2 a.m.

“I was a single mom at this point, and I had a full-time job and taking care of three children,” Kleinert said. “I spent every waking hour educating myself, on finance, on business, on networking. I did not have money for the business, so I did a lot of the work on my own. I created my own entity.”

Curtis said the city was impressed with Kleinert’s persistence on getting the business started.

“She started with very little in the beginning and worked to get it off the ground,” he said.

Kleinert, who now lives in St. Anne, did odd jobs to raise the money she needed to pay for every step of getting the business to fruition.

Through her networking, she met local business entrepreneur Dustin Kooy, who put her in touch with Mike Ader, the owner of Home Appliance & Heating in Kankakee.

Ader had space available at 1292 W. Station St. that used to house the furniture department.

The space made the perfect fit for MCA Adult Day Center. Kleinert is leasing approximately 3,100 square feet, and a donation of $15,000 from the Sisters of the Holy Heart of Mary and money she saved helped launch the business.

MCA Adult Day Center is compliant with the state of Illinois in terms of its services and programs. MCA serves seniors who suffer from social isolation, chronic illnesses and early-stage dementia and Alzheimer’s, filling a gap in the community.

“She took a concept and turned it into reality,” Curtis said. “It’s a need that’s in the community.”

COST

MCA offers its services for the entire day (8 a.m.-5 p.m.) for $80, and included in the services are activities, breakfast and lunch, snacks and supervision. In comparison, Kleinert said that a home health aid costs from $25 to $35 per hour.

Activities offered are arts and crafts, music therapy, dance therapy and other group sessions.

“We have some community members that come in from different organizations, and they will talk about their organization and we’ll do an activity with them,” Kleinert said. “We do outings as well, so we will take them out into the community, to different organizations or different events that they have.”

MCA employs an administrative assistant, and Kleinert said there have been gracious people in the community who have donated their time in four-hour increments.

“The Sisters of the Holy Heart of Mary have been phenomenal,” she said. “They send someone here every day. I’m just OK running it alone, but my goal is to create a team of a social worker, a nurse practitioner and a CNA.”

What MCA offers now is what Kleinert says is phase one of the services. Phase two would be to be able to accept Medicare and Medicaid, and she working on getting that accreditation. Phase three would offer occupational therapy, and physical and speech therapy services.

“The whole goal is to be a support system for the families through the progression of their illness, but also just the aging process itself,” Kleinert said.

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