Connection, Compassion and Care: The Heart of Who We Are

For over 25 years, Benchmark Senior Living has been dedicated to building an organization devoted to connecting with and caring for others.

Creating a strong community like ours with independent living, assisted living, and mind and memory care offerings involves understanding our residents’ needs and helping them engage with others in the ways that matter most. Our foundation is solid because connection, compassion and care are at the heart of who we are.

Benchmark places so much importance on integrating our core values into who we are that we developed these values by asking our associates to identify and articulate the main qualities that characterize our organization. We didn’t want to merely invent values we might aspire to. We wanted to know who we already were. In this way, we could be certain that we were an organization already living up to its own high standards of authenticity and care.

In order to continue offering excellent care, we incorporate three critical organizational values into our work: Called to Care, Better Together and Be the Benchmark, which we refine and foster, thoughtfully.

Called to Care

Our culture of caring extends across each of our communities and deep within our organization itself.

Our certified nursing assistant (CNA), Lena Robinson, exemplifies what it means to be “Called to Care” because she indefinitely postponed her own retirement to continue serving our residents at the height of COVID. She has always been drawn to caring for people who need help, without seeming to distinguish between those she helps at work and those from her family at home. “They needed me more than ever,” she explains.

Better Together

Collectively, we provide better care for others when we tap into our own diversity and acknowledge the strengths in our personalities, backgrounds, and life experience.

Beatriz Villagomez, one of our resident care managers and an employee for 25 years, has always thought of the Benchmark community, both those she works with at the company and the residents, as family. Her transition from her own family, to teaching, and then caretaking, was made easier by her natural maternal instincts. She is comfortable working in an environment where people connect and share in order to be at their best. She says of her residents: “I am lucky to have them.”

Be the Benchmark

We strive to set the benchmark for excellent care and then raise it.

Jessica Duffy, now a Traditional Care Director, thinks about her residents as family and goes the extra mile to improve their lives. When one resident began struggling to move around with a walker while carrying a beloved doll, Duffy knit a hammock to attach the doll securely to the resident’s walker. She is known for this kind of empathetic, individualized care.

With a team dedicated to our values of Called to Care, Better Together, and Be the Benchmark, it’s no wonder that Benchmark Senior Living has been rated consistently as one of the top senior living providers in New England, garnering well over 200 national, regional, state, and local awards, including multiple awards in Best Senior Living by U.S. News & World Report. What makes any organization truly outstanding is when it can show its excellence from the inside out. We are proud to have been named one of the best places to work for all 14 years that The Boston Globe has surveyed employees of Massachusetts companies. Furthermore, we believe in supporting our neighbors and nonprofit organizations. In 2020 and 2019, Boston Business Journal named us one of the largest corporate contributors in Massachusetts.

Everything we do keeps us tethered and true to our highest priority, a strong commitment to excellence in senior care.