Pro Seniors hits a major milestone in 2025 while continuing its mission of helping seniors
Pro Seniors, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping older Ohioans resolve legal and long-term care problems and fight Medicare fraud, is celebrating 50 years of assisting seniors in 2025. Over the years, the organization has helped seniors throughout Greater Cincinnati and beyond advocate for themselves and their community.
Pro Seniors’ origin can be traced back to 1975 when the Council on Aging of Southwest Ohio identified a need to educate seniors and their advocates on their legal rights, as well as how to navigate the red tape surrounding benefits like Medicare and Medicaid. The council brought on Judy Green to tackle this project.
“It was hard for people to explain to their clients what these services would do for them and how to get them,” says Green.
Working with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati, Green was able to able to create a program educating others on how to approach these programs. The program was so successful that Green was asked to create Pro Seniors to continue this work, becoming Pro Seniors’ first executive director.
While working to provide seniors with legal help, Green applied to the state to have Pro Seniors run a long-term care ombudsman program, in which advocates seek resolution of problems and support the rights of home care consumers and residents of long-term care facilities.
While each executive director has left their mark on the organization, Rhonda Moore Bedall’s 18 years with the organization were especially transformative. A lawyer who specialized in estate planning and administration while at Graydon Head (now Bricker Graydon), Bedall wanted the second part of her career to be in the nonprofit world.
“I was really passionate about and interested in supporting … legal services to seniors and especially low-income seniors,” she says. “I knew it was a problem. I don’t think I truly understood the scope of the issue until I was at Pro Seniors.”
During Bedall’s tenure, which spanned from 2001 to 2019, Pro Seniors added the Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) program to its services. “That’s really been just a successful program on so many levels. It started to really help address the problem of Medicare fraud, waste and abuse and educating seniors about those issues and how to become better Medicare beneficiaries. And, since it was a statewide program, it also allowed us piggyback on that and extend our outreach into the entire state of Ohio,” she says.
Other changes included the addition of the Pension Project (which allowed Pro Seniors lawyers to obtain pension and retirement benefits for seniors), the start of the nonprofit’s development and fundraising program and the creation of the Seniors Who Rock event.
“I really like that idea of combating ageism and highlighting the vibrant seniors who are still out there contributing to community,” says Bedall of the event.
Both Bedall and Green are proud of how far Pro Seniors has come, and what it may be able to do in the future.
“Fifty years. It is wonderful that it [continues] because some agencies lose their focus,” says Green. “I’m very proud of it.”
Adds Bedall, “It was just such an honor and a privilege to be able to support the advocates and the work they did… I think a lot of times people don’t understand how dedicated many people in the nonprofit world are and how they do such important, difficult work with really not the kind of resources one would see in the corporate world or the private sector. So, for me, it was just an honor to be a little part of it.”
