Family Bridges - About the founders

Mike and Shannon Garfunkel both grew up in the areas Family Bridges serves right here in the Tristate. We are the owners and operators of Family Bridges Home Care. Shannon was born and raised in Cincinnati. Mike was raised in Dayton Ohio and moved to Cincinnati to attend College in 1980 and has lived there since. Both of us were raised in a close Family environment and we are happy we have been able to establish our own Family and business close to our Parents.

Both of us attended college at the University of Cincinnati. After college, Shannon began working in daycare and various support roles ultimately landing at Jewish Family Services(JFS). There she was impressed with the effects of the work she and others were doing and how it made such a positive impact on the families JFS served. Her career took a breather in late 2000 when we had our first son. Since then she has juggled her time being a Mom to our 2 boys and helping with the Family business. Mike after graduating from UC entered a career in the service industry as a Financial Advisor for Wall Street firms. While this was a good profession, over time it became less satisfying emotionally. After several years exploring different career avenues, non-medical home care seemed to answer the call. This was an opportunity for us to own our own business and control the quality of the care delivered to seniors. We also were able to make an immediate and significant positive impact on many people’s lives. Both of us had seen first hand the difficulties of caring for aging grandparents. We saw how hard it was for everyone to juggle their responsibilities to be sure our loved ones were cared for while making sure all of our other commitments to job and family were still met. Consequently, it was very easy for us to understand the real need for high quality, affordable private duty home care.

Family Bridges - About our business

In 2003 we invested in opened a non-medical national franchised agency. This is a very satisfying profession and we developed systems to ensure our service was delivered at the highest levels of quality. We had great success and started another franchise in Dayton Ohio in 2005. In 2009 after having served nearly 2000 individuals, it became apparent that we no longer needed a franchise to deliver the highest quality service in these markets. Thus, we terminated our franchise agreement and Family Bridges Home care was born.