Our Community
Our commitment is to you!
Calvin Community offers a complete continuum of care, including independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.
A Continuing Care Retirement Community
Continuum of care on our Des Moines campus
Calvin Community will work with you to determine the best level of care – creating a helpful environment that supports independence by tailoring services to fit personal needs. Residents never have to leave our community for care. As a result, relationships deepen over time. Our community functions and cares for one another as a community.
Why is a continuum of care important?
Peace of mind for residents and their families comes in knowing the community will support whatever is required as needs change.
Peace of mind for retirement living
Our promise is, and has always been, that no Calvin resident is ever asked to leave should their resources be exhausted.
A focus on caring for Iowa's older adults
Calvin Community is a faith-based, not-for-profit retirement community providing individualized care by a team of dedicated professionals in Des Moines’ charming Beaverdale neighborhood.
Our mission is to provide, on a non-profit basis, services to older adults in a caring, Christian community designed to meet their physical, social, spiritual and psychological needs and contribute to their health, security and happiness.
Our Des Moines neighborhood
Calvin Community is rooted in Des Moines’ Beaverdale neighborhood. We’ve been in Beaverdale for more than 50 years, and Calvin residents and their families are involved in this neighborhood.
Our residents and their families appreciate Calvin’s location; a grocery store, specialty shops, bookstores, pharmacies and much more are only a block away.
Many churches are located in the Beaverdale Neighborhood, too, including the Calvin Community founder – Westminster Presbyterian Church.
Calvin’s campus
Our campus continues to evolve with our needs, including remodeled facilities to maintain a comfortable living environment at Calvin. We’re told our kitchen offers some of the most delicious food in the greater Des Moines area. Our gardens – a shared joy for residents and visitor alike – receive compliment after compliment. And our maintenance staff makes sure our campus is well taken care of inside and out. The living environment and the culture combine to deliver an inviting, wonderful place to live.
Calvin’s history
Dr. Ted Yeates, a senior pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church, is credited with the earliest concept for Calvin Community – remodeling a house to create a residential retirement facility in Des Moines. However, planning meetings in 1959 quickly expanded the concept to a facility that, when fully occupied, would employ approximately 140 people and house 200 residents.
As soon as the project was announced to the public – even before the exact nature or cost of the facility was determined – Calvin began receiving requests for information.
Nearly 5,000 people attended an open house on May 16, 1965. Calvin opened to its first 50 residents the next day. By July, Calvin was half full. The Community was officially dedicated on September 25, 1965 by the Presbytery of Des Moines. And 100 apartments had been contracted by November 1965.
Today, about 200 residents call Calvin Community home. Recent remodeling projects have helped maintain and update the facility, and new programs and amenities are being offered as a result of input from the Board of Directors and Resident’s Council.