Once again this year — this Sunday, in fact — Rockland Community College will host the American Heart Association’s Start! Heart Walk, an event that is expected to draw about 3,000 participants from Rockland, Bergen and Passiac counties.

The event begins with a program of speakers at 10:30 — including Rich Henning of Park Ridge N.J., who survived a heart attack at 43, and Audrey Liguanti of Spring Valley relating her 16-year-old son’s battle with cardiovascular disease.

The Walk itself kicks off at 11 a.m.

There will be a “Kids Zone,” with face painting, clowns and an inflatable “moon bounce.”

Blood pressure screenings and healthy cooking demonstrations will be among the highlights for adults.

You may drive along Route 59 every day for years and not see the scenes captured by the professional and serious amateur photographers taking part in the “59×59” exhibit now on view at the GAGA Arts Center in the Garnerville Arts and Industrial Complex.

The show opened last weekend as part of the two-day GAGA Arts Festival, but continues on Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m., Saturdays from 2 to 6 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. through June 6.

But this Saturday there’s a special opportunity. The public is invited to join the 31 participating photographers and their friends and family for a reception at GAGA from  6 to 10 p.m.

The first weekend reaction was overwhelming, says Ken Karlewicz, the professional photographer who was the mastermind behind the project last May 9. Karlewicz has several of his own shots in the exhibit, but more important to him are the works by his teen photography students from around the county.

One of those, an environmental portrait of the late Ellen Ferretti of Nanuet — whose home was all but encircled by the Nanuet Mall — captures decades of history in a single fram taken by 18-year-old Wilfry Fana of Haverstraw.

You can see Wilfry’s work and all the rest — and meet the artists themselves — tomorrow evening at GAGA. 

There’s no charge for the exhibit or the reception, although donations are accepted and all the photos are available for sale from the photographers.

Consider what’s happening to Haverstraw’s Hannah Sadak and then spin the clock forward about 20 years, to a day when millions of Baby Boomers are in their mid-80s to early 90s and can no longer hack it living on their own.

Sadak’s drama — and her family’s — may be played out thousands of time a day unless government and public policy awaken to the needs of an aging population.

Fortunately, I was able to keep my dad at home, living with my children and I, until the day he died at 88.

But suppose I didn’t own a home and have room. Suppose he had had to stay in his Bronx apartment. Suppose we didn’t have the money for around-the-clock care. He wanted no part of nursing homes, but there may have been no option.

Except, perhaps, for one Sadak’s family has employed— having a family member, in this case a 28-year-old grandson, spend nights at her apartment.

It might have been possible for one of my adult children to put off starting their career long enough to help take care of pop. It would have been a considerable sacrifice, but it’s what many people do for loved ones.

In our case, pop was with us and we all shared the load during the time when his part-time aide wasn’t on duty.

But suppose we did that at pop’s apartment, and suppose he lived in an all-senior environment, bound either by management choice or federal regulation, as the Sadak family seems to have been told.

It’s a scenario that deeply concerned Martin Bernstein, who in his last years worked to maximize use of the county’s adult home. His belief was that, as Boomers age, the need would only get greater for supportive, government-operated housing situations that, unlike private assisted living developments, doesn’t charge $3,000 to $4,000 or more a month.

In that respect, Bernstein, who made his living in real estate and devoted his spare time to watching over his beloved Clarkstown, was a visionary.

On its face, it seems the Sadak family — her daughter and grandson — were doing the right thing and going about it in the right way, alerting management to the problem and their proposed solution of having a family member stay with Sadak overnight while she recovers from a broken leg and strokes.

And it seem now that management at the Warren Knolls Apartments may be seeing the light.

But the time is going to come when handling this on a case by case basis isn’t going to work.

There may be millions of families facing the same issue — providing family-driven care in an elderly individual’s home when paid caregivers or high-priced facilities are out of their reach or don’t fit their needs.

As a society, we’re going to need to meet that need with facilities and with rules that flex enough to withstand the strain of old age, illness and limited income.

We owe that to a generation that will live longer than any before it.