The Aging Care Matters team is made up of credentialed professionals with extensive experience supporting older adults and caregivers throughout Raleigh, Durham, Wake Forest, Chapel Hill, and the surrounding Triangle communities. Our team includes care managers, dementia-informed professionals, senior living leaders, program directors, social work professionals, and compassionate support staff who understand both the emotional and practical realities families face while navigating aging. While our backgrounds and roles vary, the trait that connects every member of our team is this: we genuinely care about helping families feel less overwhelmed and less alone during some of the hardest moments of their lives. That sense of advocacy, compassion, and purpose is at the heart of why we do this work every day. Carla Payne founded Aging Care Matters after personally experiencing the overwhelming reality of navigating her own father’s decline and death in 2008 as a long-distance daughter. Trying to coordinate care, understand medical decisions, manage emotions, and advocate from afar gave her firsthand understanding of how exhausting, confusing, and isolating aging care can feel for families. That personal experience deepened and shaped the professional work she had already begun in aging advocacy as an Ombudsman serving residents in skilled nursing and long-term care settings beginning in 2005. Carla saw both professionally and personally how families were often left trying to make enormous medical, caregiving, and financial decisions with little guidance, poor communication between systems, and no clear roadmap for what came next. Carla earned her Bachelor of Science in Human Services and Master’s degree in Counseling from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She also earned a Certificate in Gerontology from West Chester University and became a nationally Certified Care Manager (CMC). She served in leadership positions with the Aging Life Care Association in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina, including Southeast Chapter President beginning in 2023. She was recognized as the 2019 Southeast Chapter Member of the Year for her leadership and contributions to the profession. In 2018, Carla founded Aging Care Matters as a solo care management practice serving Triangle families. Since then, the company has expanded into a growing aging support organization providing professional care management alongside three Adult Day Centers in Wake Forest and Durham. The moment that most directly led to Aging Care Matters existing was Carla’s realization during her father’s decline that families do not simply need information — they need an experienced advocate walking beside them through the entire journey. COO & Director, Wake Forest Wake Forest Wake Forest Wake Forest Director, South Point / Golden Horizons South Point Durham Southpoint Golden Horizons Golden Horizons The heart of our Adult Day Centers is our activity and engagement approach — creating connection, structure, joy, reassurance, and meaningful moments throughout each day for our participants. Our staff receive dementia-informed training and ongoing guidance in communication approaches, redirection techniques, behavioral understanding, and relationship-centered care. We focus not simply on “keeping people busy,” but on helping older adults remain socially engaged, emotionally supported, cognitively stimulated, and treated with dignity. We also intentionally maintain supportive staff-to-participant ratios so participants receive individualized attention, supervision, encouragement, and relationship-building throughout the day rather than feeling lost in a crowd. Something many prospective families are surprised to discover is how emotionally invested our activity staff become in the participants. Families often expect structured activities and supervision — but what they do not expect is how deeply our team members genuinely know, love, celebrate, encourage, and connect with the people who walk through our doors each day. Often the very first experience families have with Aging Care Matters is not during a formal assessment or crisis meeting — it is during an emotional first phone call when they are overwhelmed, scared, exhausted, or simply unsure where to start. That is why we believe the people answering phones, coordinating schedules, helping with intake, responding to questions, and assisting with billing matter deeply. Families are not routed through a corporate call center or anonymous system. They speak with real people who understand the emotional weight behind these calls and who genuinely want to help families feel heard, supported, and guided toward the right next step. Whether speaking with Carla, a care manager, a center director, or any member of our team, our goal is that families feel compassion, responsiveness, patience, and reassurance from the very first conversation. Aging Care Matters is always looking for compassionate, emotionally intelligent, relationship-centered professionals who feel called to support older adults and caregivers during some of the most challenging seasons of life. We value kindness, professionalism, initiative, teamwork, and people who genuinely care about making a difference in the lives of families navigating aging, dementia, caregiving, and life transitions. If you believe this work is more than “just a job,” we would love to hear from you.
Who Are We?
Carla Payne, MA, CMC
Founder and Owner, Aging Care Matters
Jill Jones Murr
Cindy Davis
Laura Cashwell
Stavie Thompson
Lisha Vandersteen
Janise Robinson
Morgan McCaslin
Keke Sawyer
Denise Hargraves
Activity and Program staff
Administrative and Client-Services Team
Join Our Team
