AECorner goes on their first tour to help seniors with Adaptive Equipment

Our Story

Christina and Cindy are both from Illinois. Cindy is a licensed physical therapist, and Christina is licensed speech language pathologist. They have combined experience of more than 50 years.

Our Early Days in Business

While driving home from my mom’s house after a Christmas get-together in 2014, Cindy and me, being therapy professionals, were discussing ways we could educate our patients and their caregivers more efficiently and effectively. As both home health therapists at the time, part of our treatments included patient and caregiver education. 

I’ve always said, “you can learn anything from YouTube,” We decided to start making short, easy-to-understand videos to address the most frequently asked therapy questions and launched them on YouTube.

We had no idea what we were doing. We only knew that we wanted to keep most of our videos at five minutes or less, so caregivers and patients could view the videos as many times as needed without taking too much of their precious time.

We shot most of our videos in our basement or a spare room of our house in Southern Illinois. Using only my iPhone, we shot a couple of introductory videos and some how-to videos featuring common pieces of adaptive equipment, e.g., front-wheel walker, standard walker, and crutches.

Here is the first video we made back in April 2015:

In the early days, Cindy and I paid for every piece of adaptive equipment that we featured in the videos. We learned quickly that we needed to monetize our YouTube videos. We enrolled as Amazon Affiliates to make some money to help support our mission.

We learned that adaptive equipment related to elderly people and individuals with disabilities is not considered “sexy.” So, short of capturing one of us falling or doing something goofy on a video, our content would not ever go viral. However, Cindy and I are passionate about the safety of our patients and their family caregivers. That became our mission.

AECorner’s 1st Mission Statement

Why we get out of bed each day: To give everyone their best opportunity to achieve the highest level of functional independence possible through education, information, and resources as it pertains to adaptive equipment, caregiver training and wellness.

Our Next Steps

Cindy wanted to live closer to her family in Southwestern Illinois, so in January 2017, we sold our house and moved in temporarily with Cindy’s sister. We put the video production on hold since we didn’t have additional space for creating new videos. We had already published 39 videos and received our first request from a vendor for a product review video.

After finding a house with “studio potential,” we returned to making our helpful videos. We purchased a DSLR camera, studio lights, and a professional wireless microphone. Cindy’s parents, who lived close by, acted as our stand-in patients.

It was during this time that our published videos started getting traction. We registered Adaptive Equipment & Caregiving Corner as a full-fledged LLC business, hired a company to design our website, and found a video platform so we could sell subscriptions to our videos that would be ad-free.

Professional Bad Luck or Entrepreneurial Good Fortune?

In November 2019, I was laid off for the first time ever in my career as a Speech-Language Pathologist because changes were made in Medicare pertaining to therapy treatment. My client caseload dropped, and my company let me go with a week’s severance. In disbelief and upset, I called Cindy to tell her what had happened and asked, “what are we going to do?”

She lovingly and supportively responded, “Don’t worry, come home, and we will figure it out. “Together, we decided it was time to make Adaptive Equipment & Caregiving Corner our sole source of income.

We spent the next few weeks getting our business ready to launch in January 2020, pronouncing to our friends and family, “2020 will be the year of AECorner!”  Then, in March of 2020, the U.S. was put in quarantine, and everything changed.

We spent most of 2020 and 2021 adding content to our video library and connecting with companies and organizations that would use our library to reach individuals and seniors who were becoming increasingly more isolated as the pandemic wore on.

Over the past decade, the caregiver’s role has become more challenging as many caregiving responsibilities were being imposed on family caregivers. The pandemic made that role even harder, and our passion for caregivers’ and care recipients’ safety grew exponentially. 

Boosted, Masked and Ready Roll

In September of 2022, Cindy and I will be heading East with our first special event. 

We have named it the Safety, FUNction, and Movement Tour.

The next day, we will move on and present our show to the next community in our planned itinerary.

This is our itinerary for the first tour and a map of our road trip

We are professionals who have worked with caregivers and seniors extensively, and we understand how difficult it is to get around as you age.

P.S. We would be most grateful If you would help support our tour and mission. If our mission resonates with you, please select a sponsorship level.

Sponsorship Opportunities for Safety, FUNction & Movement Tour

September 19th – October 2nd, 2022

$1,000 Sponsorship (4 available) Click to purchase: https://square.link/u/qOW1tVZD

• 1 – social media LIVE spot
• 1 – 18”x27” promo space displayed during all presentations
• 1 – QR code space on AECorner affiliate list
• Company @ mention on all social media posts during trip
• Marketing material available during all presentations

$500 Sponsorship Click to purchase: https://square.link/u/3uUIKnfW

• 1 – Verbal mention of company during interview intro to be uploaded to YouTube
• AECorner will wear company t-shirt for one day while touring
• 1 – QR code space on AECorner affiliate list
• Company @ mention on all social media posts during trip
• Marketing material available during all presentations

$275 Sponsorship Click to purchase: https://square.link/u/ZURIh1LC

• Wear one company product or merchandise during at least one presentation
• 1 – QR code space on AECorner affiliate list
• 1 – Company shout out on social media during trip
• Company @ mention on social media posts during trip
• Marketing material available during all presentations

$150 Sponsorship Click to purchase: https://square.link/u/8TcQ9UVQ

• Display company product during all presentations
• 1 – QR code space on AECorner affiliate list
• Company @ mention on social media posts during tour
• Marketing material available during all presentations

Please return to Caregiving Network and join us for free services and support.