New to Best Friends? Our introductory training will get you familiar with the approach!
- Date:October 9, 2025
- Time:2:30–4:30 EST
- Registration Fee:$75 per person
- Registration deadline:October 2, 2025
Learn how you can make people with dementia feel safe, secure, and valued by following the acclaimed Best Friends™ approach to care. This relationship-centered care model is easy to understand and brings out the best in people with dementia – and also in staff. Not only will your residents or clients benefit, but you will see how activities, mealtimes, and personal care go more smoothly and your days are more enjoyable.
This virtual training program introduces the core elements of the life-affirming Best Friends™ approach in 2 hours of interactive learning. The training is led by a Best Friends™ Expert Leader, who is either the model’s founder or a long-time practitioner and trainer of this life-affirming approach.
Participants will learn how to
- Embrace friendship to ease the dementia experience
- Use each person’s life story
- Communicate skillfully
- Understand and minimize behaviors that challenge us
- Provide meaningful engagement
- Develop the Best Friends Knack of Caregiving
The Best Friends approach is valuable to anyone working with people who live with memory loss. This includes home care settings, adult day services, assisted living, skilled nursing, acute care, and hospice. It is effective for nursing staff, activity professionals, social workers, care managers, administrators, and frontline caregivers.
Give yourself or your team the indispensable skills of a Best Friends caregiver in this lively, Zoom-based training program.
Trainer(s)
Tonya M. Cox, M.S.W., L.N.H.A.
With a long history of supporting Best Friends™ approaches in dementia care, Tonya Cox currently ensures that training and implementation of Best Friends™ practices are maintained across all care settings for the regional Kentucky-based operator Christian Care Communities in her role as Vice President of Operations. She notably blended the Best Friends approach into a Green House® site as the former Executive Director for The Homeplace at Midway. And before that was Director of Community Based Services for Christian Care, which included overseeing the original Best Friends™ Adult Day Center in Lexington, Kentucky. For more than 15 years Tonya has been developing programs and services for persons with dementia and their caregivers, including working on national curriculum development for professional caregivers in various care settings and serving as Vice President for Mission and Service for the Greater Kentucky/Southern Indiana Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Tonya presents locally and nationally on activity programming and dementia care. She is a co-author on two of the Best Friends™ books (The Best Friends Book of Alzheimer’s Activities, Volume One and Volume Two) and contributed to The Best Friends Approach to Dementia Care, Second Edition, with Virginia Bell and David Troxel. She has served as co-chair of the Kentucky Alzheimer’s Disease Advisory Council and is a practicum supervisor for both the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville Kent School of Social Work. Tonya is also Adjunct Professor at Midway University in their Health Care Administration Program.
