Youth Is Served: Tania Shines as a Care Professional
Tania Olascoaga, three years out of high school, is trying to find her way through life just as most young people her age are doing. Tania believes she wants to be an esthetician, a skincare specialist who is licensed to perform various beauty and cosmetic treatments. But for this season in her young life, Tania has proved to be an award-winning Care Professional at Home Instead® of Mount Airy, North Carolina.
“I’ve been a Home Instead Care Pro since February 2025,” said Tania, a North Surry High School graduate who played on the Greyhounds’ girls soccer team. “A friend recommended Home Instead to me, so I started with Home Instead immediately after I had finished taking classes in Greensboro to become an esthetician.”
Tania added: “I want to go further into being an esthetician, so I took another class a couple of months back. In the future, I will hopefully be able to take a business class as well.”
For now, Tania is excelling as a senior-care professional. She has impressed the Home Instead staff, and a veteran office worker said: “Tania is an inspiration due to being young and having such enthusiasm. She also is very responsible as she assists her client, and we believe she is doing a great job. As a result, we selected Tania as our Care Pro of the Month for June.”
Among the considerations for achieving Care Pro of the Month status, an employee has shown she has gone above and beyond the call of duty. Empathy and compassion are taken into account for the award, as well as skill and wisdom for dealing with challenges. Tania embodies Home Instead’s guiding principles of “Build Trust, Take the Lead and Share Your Heart.”
Tania isn’t a total newcomer to senior care, having served as a family caregiver. “My grandma had Alzheimer’s disease and depended on her family a lot for day-to-day assistance. Any chance I had, I would help my mom with my grandma’s care to the best of my ability,” Tania said.
Tania provides her Home Instead clients with safety assurance, meal preparation, medication reminders, light housekeeping, and transportation and errands. She offers assistance with eating, grooming, dressing, bathing, incontinence care, cognitive impairment, hospice support and mobility. By doing so, Tania not only assists her clients, but she helps their families eliminate worry and reduce stress.
To build on their knowledge and experience, Tania and other Mount Airy Care Pros are offered the opportunity to increase their dementia-care skills by taking part in the Home Instead network’s one-of-a-kind training protocol. Home Instead’s Person-Centered Care Training for Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias is recognized by the Alzheimer’s Association® for incorporating the evidence-based dementia-care practice recommendations in person-centered care, assessment and care planning, activities of daily living, and behaviors and communication.
Focusing on Home Instead’s training, processes and procedures of successful caregiving helped Tania achieve her award. Assisting seniors on behalf of the Home Instead franchise owned by Van and Ann Lankford has been a positive experience for Tania. “The things I like most about my job include learning about my clients, such as what draws their attention, what makes them laugh and learning what they love,” Tania said. “My client relates stories about growing up with her siblings and how much things have changed over the years from her perspective.”
Tania is an important member of the Care Pro team for one of North Carolina’s outstanding Home Instead franchises, a member of the world’s largest home-care network with the most advanced care platform. Overall, there are more than 100,000 Care Pros across 13 countries, meeting the growing needs of millions of older adults and their families worldwide. For Tania and her fellow Care Pros, touching lives impacts their souls.
