Aging Forward

Upon graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, David Dunkelman, M.S., J.D., traveled around the world for year, hitchhiking and using public transportation, visiting 26 countries and three war zones, and observing many ways that people live and die. He left the United States an angry young man and returned a patriot after seeing how so many other societies functioned. After graduating from Temple University School of Law, he helped his family’s apparel company grow to an organization that distributed to 5,000 retailers nationally. The company closed when computers suddenly disrupted the nation’s centuries-old clothing supply chain, an ominous preview to what would also happen to aging in America.

Dunkelman then completed a master’s degree from the Center for Studies in Aging at the University of North Texas. After two internships he moved to Buffalo, NY, where for 30 years he was the founding President and CEO of one of the nation’s largest and most multifaceted campuses for older people. The campus was the first organization for older people to be a winner of the national Peter F. Drucker Award for Innovation in Nonprofit Management.

Among his many individual awards are the Community Leadership Award from the Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies, Buffalo, NY (2013) and the Dr. Evan Calkins Meritorious Service Award, for “lifetime contributions to the field of aging,” presented by the Western New York Network in Aging, Inc. (2007).

Using creative problem-solving techniques developed at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dunkelman has consulted nationally with more than 25 communities, helping them to develop strategic approaches to facility and programmatic design for older people. He writes and speaks about aging in America.

Martha Dunkelman, Ph.D., is a writer and editor who has written numerous articles, reviews, and brochures, as well as serving as book editor for an online periodical. She has also written and edited materials for the Educational Testing Service and the College Board. She credits her father, Dr. Maurice Levine, with teaching her to write in her teenage years, when she was not always the most willing student.

After graduating from Wellesley College, she received a Ph.D. from New York University under the wise and kind guidance of H. W. Janson and spent many years in teaching and administration as a professor at Wright State University, the University at Buffalo, and Canisius College.

She learned about the care of older people from decades of bearing witness to the struggles and achievements of her husband David.