Jennifer Traglia can pinpoint the moment her life's work began, though she did not know it at the time. She was in fifth grade in International Falls, Minnesota, delivering newspapers after school, and what she noticed was not the weight of the papers or the monotony of the route but something else entirely: she loved being around older adults with their rich history and stories of overcoming adversity. The way they navigated daily challenges, both big and small, helped her recognize a natural affinity that would shape the next several decades of her life.
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Most people cannot say with certainty what they were meant to do. They stumble into careers through accident or necessity, through the suggestions of parents or the limitations of circumstance. Traglia's path was different. From that first paper route forward, she has moved consistently in one direction, working with older adults and their caregivers, volunteering with senior organizations, building a career in a field that others might have overlooked. There is a clarity to such devotion, a rare coherence between inclination and occupation.
She came to senior housing from hospitality, beginning in sales and marketing at a continuing care retirement community outside Chicago. The transition made sense to her. Both industries concern themselves with making people comfortable, with the management of daily life, with the delicate choreography of human needs. But in senior housing, she discovered something hospitality had not shown her: the extraordinary difference that proactive planning could make in a person's final years. She watched families navigate the landscape of aging, and what she saw was a pattern. When caregivers and loved ones understood where to find resources, when they planned ahead rather than waiting for crisis, the older adult suffered fewer emergencies, fewer desperate scrambles, fewer moments of panic and chaos.
It was a simple observation, but it became the organizing principle of her work.
The case that clarified everything involved a family who hired her to mediate their differences over the care of their mother. The mother had fallen several times at home, and the children could not agree on what to do next. Traglia prepared for conflict, for the kind of bitter sibling warfare that often emerges when parents grow frail. But when she sat down with the family, she realized they did not need mediation at all. They were respectful of one another. They listened. They were willing to consider options. What they lacked was not goodwill but information. They did not need someone to referee their arguments. They needed someone to show them what was possible.
That realization became the foundation of her geriatric care management practice. Instead of positioning herself as a mediator, she began offering families a few well-constructed plans to consider. She gave them a framework, a way to think through the impossible decisions that aging requires. It was not about telling families what to do. It was about giving them the tools to make informed choices, about showing them the landscape so they could find their own way through it.
Traglia takes her work seriously because healthcare, she believes, is the most intimate part of someone's life. She respects and honors all that comes with it, always focusing on the holistic picture: the care recipient, the family, the support systems they have or the support they lack. There is no room for carelessness in such work, no room for half-measures. People are at their most vulnerable when they are old and ill, and Traglia understands that the decisions made in those moments ripple outward, affecting not just the older adult but everyone who loves them.
A pivotal step in her career journey came when she joined a healthcare tech startup. That experience opened her eyes to the possibility of creating and delivering care solutions through technology. She got to see the entire process of growing a new tech company, an experience that would prove hugely impactful in shaping her vision for the future of senior care.
Now, as a gerontology and longevity strategist working in senior housing operations, she aligns market opportunities across disciplines, trying to see the larger patterns in a fragmented field. She is excited about technology, about the solutions emerging that promise to make aging easier and safer. But she is also cautious. Some innovations are genuinely valuable. Others are simply trying to ride the wave, offering little substance beneath the marketing. She believes in taking the time to understand the value proposition, in vetting solutions carefully before adopting them.
Jennifer sees great potential for strengthening care coordination through the opportunities that technology brings to the aging ecosystem. Healthcare, she has observed, still operates in disparate lanes. Doctors do not always talk to financial planners. Financial planners do not always talk to attorneys. Families fill out form after form, repeating the same information, navigating a system that seems designed for inefficiency. What is needed, she believes, is better alignment, a way to tie everything together so that older adults and their families are not left to cobble together care from a dozen disconnected sources.
Her advice to others entering the field is simple: be curious and stay curious. Find a manager or leader who is a good coach. Stay open to receiving constructive feedback. It is advice born from experience, from years of watching people succeed or fail based not on their intelligence but on their willingness to learn, to adapt, to remain humble in the face of what they do not yet know.
Traglia's career has been built on attention, on noticing what others overlook. She saw, as a child, that she enjoyed the company of older people. She saw, in her early career, that proactive planning could prevent crises. She saw, in that first family meeting, that what people needed was not conflict resolution but clarity. And she sees now, in the sprawling complexity of the aging care system, that the real work ahead is not in adding more services but in connecting the ones that already exist.
It is a modest vision in some ways, this idea that care could be better coordinated, that technology could be thoughtfully deployed, that families could be given the information they need to make good decisions. But modesty can be its own form of ambition. Traglia is not interested in revolutionary rhetoric or grand gestures. She is interested in the patient architecture of care, in building systems that work, in making life easier for people at their most difficult moment. It is the kind of work that does not announce itself, that happens quietly in hospital rooms and family meetings and senior housing facilities. But it is also the kind of work that, done well, changes everything.