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Tuesday, January 27, 2026
As reported by Erin McGroarty, Cap Times
With a $7 million donation from a Madison couple, a Dane County hospice company plans to build a new kind of memory care facility in Fitchburg with the goal of centering quality of life for those with dementia.
The “dementia village” will be the first of its kind in the United States, based on a model established in the Netherlands that prioritizes independence and autonomy for those living with diminished memory. The model steers away from hospital-like memory care units with strict security measures and, instead, will allow residents to move freely about the community and make independent decisions on how to go about their day.
Philanthropist Ellen Johnson, 88, said she’s been heartbroken as she’s watched family and friends suffer the effects of dementia in locked memory care units.
“We’ve had too many friends suffer with some form or other of dementia,” Johnson told the Cap Times. “It’s so sad to see our friends moving into a parallel that we can’t relate to them. They don’t remember who we are.”
She and her husband, Peter, made the $7 million contribution to Agrace Hospice Care after funding a portion of the organization’s existing Fitchburg end-of-life facility — of which the couple are namesakes.
“This dementia village model that we are supporting treats people with any kind of dementia disorders in a much more humane way and a much more successful way, by putting them in an environment that is near to what they’re interested in and used to in their home environment,” Johnson said.
Agrace plans to break ground on the $40 million project this spring and be ready to accept residents in September 2027.
The community will have eight houses with eight bedrooms each as well as a kitchen and living room area. Residents with similar interests or life experiences will live in houses with each other and round-the-clock staff. The community will feature a restaurant, a day center, outdoor spaces like a park or garden, a salon, shops and cafes and a movie theater.
At the center of the project’s mission is the guiding principle of improving quality of life for those with dementia in a setting where residents can feel as though they are still in control of their daily lives.
“We didn’t want to do what was already being done in various memory care units across all of the communities that we serve. We didn’t want to do something that I could go up the street and find. We wanted to do something that maybe had better outcomes,” Agrace CEO Lynne Sexten said in an interview with the Cap Times.
More than half of Agrace’s hospice patients have some sort of dementia diagnosis, nearly two-thirds of the nonprofit’s palliative care patients also have a dementia diagnosis and almost all of those who receive services at Agrace’s adult day center have been diagnosed with a form of dementia, Sexten said.
In Wisconsin, more than 10% of residents ages 65 and older have a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.
Sexten said her organization has learned a lot about what works in memory care and what could use some work and an innovative approach.
“Study after study in the United States shows that quality of life from the moment of diagnosis through death is just a precipitous decline,” Sexten said.
Agrace’s dementia village hopes to disrupt that curve.
The idea for the facility Agrace plans to build comes from a style of memory care founded in the Netherlands at the Hogeweyk Dementia Village.
This facility serves as hospice care for those with dementia but operates as a small gated community with apartment units, cafes, shops, parks and gardens. Staff wear plain clothes and nothing about the facility suggests a medical setting — though residents are able to access round-the-clock care.
Eloy van Hal, founder of the Hogeweyk Dementia Village, said he is thrilled to see his model for memory care reach the United States.
“Agrace is, I think from what I’ve seen so far, the first organization in the United States that really is challenging — even more than others who are working on this — how you look at quality of life for the individuals,” van Hal said in an interview with the Cap Times. “And quality of life means, how do you create a real, normal living environment where you can experience nature, where you can go outside, where you live in a small group, where you’re seen as a person.”
A key part of his village, which opened in 2010, prioritizes independence. Yes, Hogeweyk is a gated community that naturally carries some security measures for residents, but someone living there can walk out their door, go to a restaurant or sit in a garden, and experience as close to a normal life as possible.
“We see that people stay for a much longer period in a better physical, mental, social, spiritual condition,” he said.
Memory care organizations have used the Hogeweyk model in parts of Europe, Australia, China and Canada, but the Fitchburg facility is slated to be the first of its kind in the United States. It will differ from Livasu, a Sheboygan County-based project that will allow people with dementia to buy homes where they can live with their family and bring in hired help.
Agrace’s dementia village will be a state-licensed health care facility, Sexten said. Her organization is working through the licensing process.
Dementia diagnoses almost always bring about an increased risk of depression and anxiety. That’s according to Dr. Ken Robbins, a psychiatrist who oversees memory care at Agrace and will manage much of the on-the-ground care at the dementia village.
Being placed in a locked memory care unit that’s more akin to a hospital than a home doesn’t help with that, Robbins said.
The hope is that by centering quality of life at Agrace’s dementia village, the risk of corresponding depression and anxiety about one’s surroundings might be decreased.
“For many people, it’s a hopeless-sounding diagnosis that people don’t want to have to live with,” Robbins said. “The idea here is to make life more like it would have been otherwise, to live in a household, to stay active with interests and physical activity, to develop friendships and other social relationships, to try to avoid some of the depression, some of the anxiety that often comes with dementia, to find ways to help people to live lives that they feel are meaningful, as opposed to feeling like they’re wasting away.”
Dr. Hilary Bingol, vice president of medical services at Agrace, says even the ability to go for a walk and share in outdoor spaces can improve medical outcomes.
“Just from a commonsense standpoint, one can understand why that would make such a difference in their overall health, not just related to their dementia, but to everything,” Bingol said. “If they have high blood pressure, if they have heart disease, if they have lung disease, you know, if they’re more stimulated and more active and they’re not sedentary, well, they’re going to feel better, and they’re going to have a better quality of life, and that’s been proven to improve longevity.”
The village will have a team of nurse practitioners who provide the vast majority of medical care to the residents under the supervision of Bingol and Robbins.
Providing medical care to those with dementia comes with its own unique set of challenges. Someone struggling with memory might not trust medications prescribed to them or remember to take daily prescriptions, Bingol said. By having a team of providers at the village every day, the goal is to establish a better sense of familiarity among the residents and the health workers.
The goal is for people to move into the village sooner after receiving a diagnosis and before the disease progresses to the point that patients can’t develop familiarity. With dementia, it’s easier to access old memories than to form new ones, Robbins said. If someone moves into the village while they’re still able to form memories, they will feel more comfortable in the environment once that brain function declines, he explained.
“They can form relationships with their housemates, with other people who are residents there, with staff and and then it becomes old memories, and it lasts a lot longer. They are able to, hopefully to the end, feel comfortable with where they are and feel like they have relationships with the people around them, that they’re not all strangers, and it’s not merely so frightening,” he said.
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