A lifestyle coordinator is responsible for developing, implementing and maintaining activities and experiences for residents of elderly care facilities, camps and other communal facilities. In doing so, the lifestyle coordinator enriches the lives of people in communal housing through entertainment and occupation, in effect providing a sense of purpose. A lifestyle coordinator's generic job description defines what he must do in order to meet his goals.

Essential Duties

The lifestyle coordinator's most basic responsibility is to develop, implement and maintain a particular lifestyle curriculum geared toward the specific facility. In general, this includes all aspects of life in a communal facility such as meals, meal schedules and various types of activities involving daily living, work, leisure and recreation. The lifestyle coordinator coordinates activities to cater to the social, occupational, religious and cultural needs of the residents of the facility in order to meet the desired outcome of the program.

Part of developing a lifestyle program is determining the needs of the residents and assessing and reviewing various program implementations and outcomes. This involves assessment of the psychosocial, occupational, cognitive, spiritual and cultural needs of the residents on an ongoing basis and occasional liaison with other workers of the communal facility. This provides a way for lifestyle coordinators to improve on lifestyle curricula as needed by the facility.

Supervisory Duties

A lifestyle coordinator needs lifestyle assistants to implement the program, and therefore he is required to supervise their activities. This is done to ensure that services are implemented properly in accordance to an approved lifestyle curriculum. Supervision requires proper task delegation, ensuring effective communication with lifestyle assistants and other staff members, oversight and guidance of staff as duties are carried out, regular meetings with staff and provision of updates and other required information to staff.

Administrative Duties

Developing, implementing, reviewing and updating a lifestyle curriculum program requires making a budget, acquiring necessary resources, assistance in hiring staff, ensuring accurate documentation and liaising with other departments of the communal facility. Proper documentation includes recording the progress of the lifestyle curriculum and identifying areas for improvement. In managing lifestyle assistants, a lifestyle coordinator needs to monitor each staff member's performance and provide help in improving their skills. Lifestyle coordinators have to work on a certain budget and must be able to propose a needed budget based on analysis of the needs of the residents. Once a budget is available, the lifestyle coordinator must efficiently manage available funds to make sure that the lifestyle curriculum runs smoothly.

Duties to Self

Knowledge in any field requires constant updating, and the lifestyle coordinator must continue to educate herself with regard to the trends of her profession. This can be done through study of updated literature, seminars and even postgraduate training and workshops. She should also keep her certification and credentials up to par with legislated standards.