Cheer Home Care is a La Jolla-based company that uses a team of professionals to provide personalized non-medical home care for people in the San Diego area.
It offers services including companionship, meal preparation, transportation and errands and, at higher levels, personal care, life and home organization assistance and client advocacy.
To learn more, the La Jolla Light asked the following questions of founder and Chief Executive Brooke Martindale.
Q. When and how did the business start?
A. I had a grandmother who suffered her first stroke in her late 40s. Growing up, I witnessed the pain on my parents’ faces as they described the subpar care she received from caregivers. It was hard to shake those memories, and when I was 27, I decided to start my first company to provide a better care option than what was available to my grandmother.
After more than a decade operating that company (including through COVID) with my husband, Terry, in Boston, it was time for a new chapter.
We had an opportunity to start a new adventure with our family in sunny San Diego and we took it. After considering several different professional ventures in California, I was connected with Gabrielle Pumpian and we were in agreement that combining forces could accomplish amazing things in home care.
Cheer Home Care was born after several brainstorming sessions with my husband to arrive at a name and a logo befitting this positive, fresh take on home care.
We will celebrate Cheer’s first anniversary in July, and what an exciting first year it has been!
Q. What is your mission?
A. Cheer’s goal is to cater to the advancement of caregivers and, by association, provide superior client care and to their families delivered by a progressive, knowledgeable, resourceful team with a friendly and joyful yet empathetic approach.
Q. What services do you offer?
A. Cheer offers a variety of home care services and caregiver tiers to suit every client’s needs. Although we are a strictly non-medical agency — meaning companionship and personal care (at least for now) — our team has a robust knowledge base and network and can assist in connecting a family with providers that can fill every possible care need — medical or otherwise.
Even if we can’t help, we want to help the community find the right or aging-care solution.
Q. What makes Cheer Home Care unique compared with similar businesses?
A. Home care has a reputation for being not particularly glamorous. We all age, and we all want to age well. Cheer chooses to approach aging with optimism and hope, promoting independence, joy, smiling, being the reason someone smiles, and having a little fun along the way.
This is not to say we are unaware or unequipped to deal with the more challenging aspects of aging. Rather, we feel that acknowledging those difficulties, educating ourselves and establishing a workforce where respect, dignity, competence, honesty and reliability are paramount allows us to spread some Cheer, too!
We also pride ourselves on our strong communication and being solutions-oriented. We take an individually tailored approach to each client, and our services are delivered in a proactive vs. reactive manner, with electronic care notes read daily by care managers who know what to watch for.
Lastly, Cheer’s unique care-level offerings are rare to find in an agency and I believe make our company stand out above the rest.
Q. What’s new with the business that you want everyone to know about?
A. We’re not even a year old, so everything is new — except our team’s experience, which is backed by over 100 years of work in the field of aging. That said, our team absolutely loves our office space in Bird Rock, and our guests seem to as well (we love having visitors).
The team is really excited about some of the initiatives we’ve started (or are starting soon), from dementia groups to client and community “Total Brain Health” classes or caregiver training programs. On top of this, we have introduced unique caregiver services that weren’t available in the area before Cheer, like college undergraduate or graduate students.
Q. What are some advantages of doing business in La Jolla?
A. Community. Our family is newer to the San Diego area, but the welcome we’ve received in Bird Rock with the new company and personally has been amazing. Our kids go to school here and we feel incredibly lucky to have met so many kind families that are so ive of Cheer’s mission.
As we talked about the prospect of starting a new agency here in La Jolla, it became pretty clear that we could provide a much-needed service. We are thrilled to be here and to have the opportunity to serve our neighbors.
Cheer Home Care is at 5685 La Jolla Blvd., La Jolla. For more information, visit cheerhomecare.com or call (858) 868-5500.
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