When Certified Nursing Assistant Emily Bartle called in to her shift at Morrow Home Community in Sparta, WI last summer, it wasn't because she didn't want to come to work. She was about to be homeless, and she needed a day to figure out where she was going to sleep.

That's the kind of call that could go a lot of different ways. At a lot of workplaces, it's a mark against you. At Morrow Home Community, it turned into a lifeline.

Emily's supervisor, Director of Nursing Mallory York, knew something was wrong and knew who to call. She reached out to Human Resources Manager Sara Tully, who happened to have a fully furnished apartment on campus, ready to go. Sara got Emily moved in the next day. Emily has since been thriving in her role, building her savings and enjoying some well-deserved peace and stability.

With her two-year work anniversary in the near future, Emily’s story represents the new face of long-term care recruitment and retention, where a community’s culture of care extends beyond the residents they care for to its workforce. It also reflects strategic planning that wrings value from every square foot of campus space. By embracing innovative ideas and carrying them through with a person-centered approach only a care provider could bring, Morrow Home Community has distinguished itself in a crowded and competitive labor market.

A Building Project with a Twist

The apartment in Emily’s story is one of five on campus that started as part of a much bigger project. When Morrow Home Community added twelve new units to its Bridge Path assisted living building (finished in Spring of 2025), leadership had some extra square footage on the lower level and a decision to make. CEO Dan Meyer then picked up an idea at a LeadingAge Wisconsin conference, where Community Living Solutions discussed a similar workforce housing initiative at a community in Minnesota.

“Our presentation was all about looking at the underutilized spaces on a campus and finding creative ways to get value from them,” said Duane Helwig, NCARB, AIA of Community Living Solutions, the lead design architect on the project. “Since then, we’ve designed a number of projects that transform these spaces in existing buildings and in new builds. Morrow Home Community is a great example of transforming space that would otherwise be storage into a space that supports workforce efforts and their mission.”

CEO Dan Meyer liked what he heard and ran with it: five apartments, a shared laundry room, its own secure entrance and even an outdoor patio out back, perfect for a barbecue.

“To me, it was an exciting opportunity to look at,” Dan said. “There was no hesitation in it. It's like, yes, let's figure out how to make this work.”

The original plan was to use the apartments to house workers recruited from overseas, through an agreement with a staffing partner. The visa process, however, proved to be a dead end, despite their best efforts, in light of the ever-tightening supply of visas and souring immigration climate. Morrow Home Community found itself with five brand new, fully furnished apartments and no international workers to put in them. As is often the case with workforce initiatives, it was time for a pivot.

Morrow Home Community first decided to pivot its workforce housing strategy to provide housing for agency staff. The housing proved to be excellent bargaining leverage with staffing agencies and resulted in a $10-per-hour reduction in their agency rates by avoiding hotel costs. When staffing levels normalized to the point where agency staff were no longer needed, it was time again to pivot, this time to the long-haul strategy of serving Morrow Home Community’s in-house staff.

What started as a plan to solve one recruiting problem became something better: a way to retain the good people they already had. CNAs, culinary staff, a housekeeper, and a maintenance worker have all taken advantage of the on-campus, affordable housing option, along with one employee who moved to full-time hours just so she could qualify for an apartment.

A Person-Centered Approach to Workforce

Every long-term care community in Wisconsin knows how to practice person-centered care. It's the foundation of how we treat residents: figure out who someone is, what they need, and meet them where they are. What providers might not realize is that this person-centered approach can easily carry over to workforce strategy and become long-term care’s competitive advantage in a crowded and competitive labor market.

The steps Morrow Home Community's team took to make the apartments feel like home exemplify how their treatment of one another reflects a seemingly instinctive person-centered approach.

For Human Resources Manager Sara Tully, workforce housing isn't simply another employee benefit.

It's a way to remove barriers that keep good people from succeeding.

"We have plenty of domestic workers that want a nice place to live," she said.

The fully furnished apartments include many of the everyday items someone might not think about until they're forced to start over: cookware, cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, towels, and even coffee.

Those details weren't accidental.

Nursing Home Administrator Jen Brieske worked Saturdays to furnish the apartments with international workers in mind, asking herself what would make arriving in a new community easier. When the apartments transitioned to serving Morrow Home Community employees instead, the philosophy stayed the same.

Brieske remembers discussions over something as ordinary as a coffee maker.

A Keurig machine sounded nice, but Director of Nursing Mallory York pointed out that coffee pods might become an unnecessary expense for someone already struggling financially.

The solution?

A simple drip coffee maker.

It was a small decision rooted in a much bigger question: "What does this person actually need?"

Sara Tully built a similar kind of thinking into the paperwork. No credit check, since employees are already vetted through hiring. No security deposit up front, since most people moving in don't have the cash for one. Instead, renters pay $550 a month for the first ten months, fifty dollars more than the eventual rent, and that extra money becomes a $500 security deposit they get back if they leave in good standing, money they can put toward their next place. Rent itself runs $275 every two weeks, all utilities included, fully furnished, for an apartment that would easily rent for $800 or more, unfurnished, anywhere else in Sparta.

None of it reads like policy. It reads like somebody thinking, over and over again, what would this person actually need.

The team took this person-centered approach to policy with Emily in helping her move in. Although the apartments weren't originally intended to allow pets, Emily’s cat was an important source of emotional support during an already difficult time. Rather than allowing policy to become a barrier, the team helped Emily complete the emotional support animal paperwork necessary to keep her cat with her.

No one described the decision as extraordinary.

“You have to think about the barriers people face,” Jen said, “and remove as many of them as you can.”

To them, it simply made sense.

“I think if we could take care of our staff in any way we can, we have better employees too,” said Dan.

That response says as much about Morrow Home Community's culture as the apartments themselves.

A Recruitment Tool That Turned into Something Bigger

Dan Meyer will tell you the apartments aren't a big moneymaker, and that was never really the point. “We want to bring people in as employees and keep them,” he said. “That's the goal behind it.” Even so, the investment pays for itself faster than you might expect. With construction costs of roughly $100,000 for all five units, the $500-per-month rents alone reach construction ROI in 40 months, with full occupency. When taken together with turnover costs around 25% of salary, and an average annual wage for CNAs in Wisconsin of $45,130, avoiding even one $11,283 turnover makes the payback period shorter still.

Sara markets the apartments quietly, mostly word of mouth and the occasional email to full-time and part-time staff, plus a line in the benefits section of every job posting. The units rarely sit open for long and the majority of people who leave do so on their own, sometimes moving away, sometimes just moving on.

For Emily, the difference has been huge. Her walk to work is three minutes. She sleeps more, worries less about being late, and picks up extra shifts more easily since there's no commute to plan around. She's gotten closer to her residents, she said, because she's not watching the clock at the end of a shift the way she used to.

“If I'm about to clock out and I'm having a conversation with a resident, or helping them with a task, I don't mind staying a few extra minutes,” she said. “Living here has made my work-life balance a lot easier.”

Emily eventually wants to become an art teacher. For now, she's saving toward her education while working as a CNA, and she's already talking about staying connected to long-term care, maybe as a volunteer, maybe through art therapy. She wasn't sure long-term care was for her when she started. She's since changed her mind entirely.

“I love working in long-term care. I love every single one of my residents,” she said. “If I were still in the same boat I was in a year ago, I don't think I'd be the same CNA I am now.”

Why This Matters for the Rest of Us

Every long-term care employer in Wisconsin is competing for the same workers as Kwik Trip, the local factory or the farm down the road. Often, the wage is similar. Sometimes the working conditions are easier. What none of those employers can offer is a workplace that already knows how to care for a whole person.

That's the differentiator. It's not a slogan. It's a culture that Morrow Home Community already had in place for its residents and simply extended to its team, and it shows up in a hundred small decisions nobody thought were a big deal at the time: a plain coffee maker instead of a Keurig, a security deposit and rent structure built around what people can actually afford, and a director of nursing who knew exactly who to call when an employee needed help.

Mallory York was skeptical of the whole idea when it first came up. She's since changed her mind. “It's the people that make it,” she said. “That's really the whole story.”

Ask anyone at Morrow Home Community, and they'll wave off credit. “We didn't do anything special,” Dan said. “We had some space and the opportunity and the funds to do it.” Sara sees it a little differently. “You did have to have the foresight, though, when you were building, to invest in something like this,” she said. “You have to have leadership that's willing to go outside the box and see that vision.”

Morrow Home Community's advice for any member thinking about doing the same thing is simple. Take the leap, Sara said, even if it's small. Give people the dignity of their own space, Jen said, because the little things, like a throw blanket on the couch, matter more than you'd think. And be honest with your team, Emily said, because in long-term care, you'll get more support than you expect.

Morrow Home Community built five apartments hoping to solve a recruitment puzzle from halfway around the world. What they found instead was a group of people right in their own backyard who needed a safe, stable place to live, and a team that already knew, down to the smallest detail, how to make sure they got one.

Inspired to start your own workforce housing initiative? Contact Community Living Solutions Vice President of Senior Living Operations John Huhn to learn more.