Dorothy is finally getting the peace and quiet she needs.

When the calls finally stopped, so did the worry.

This year, Cathy’s mother, Dorothy, turns 90. She moved from Chicago to live near Cathy in Arizona almost two years ago and now lives in an assisted living facility. Dorothy has dementia, and until recently, her phone rang almost nonstop with harassing calls, sometimes starting first thing in the morning, with no way to make sense of who was calling or why. As a late sleeper who enjoys slow mornings, Dorothy was losing the peace and rest she craved.

One day, Cathy received a call from a friend who had just visited her mother, who told her that Dorothy’s phone had rung nonstop while the friend was there. But the ringing didn’t just interrupt visits. It posed a fall risk. Because Dorothy uses a walker after a few falls, getting up repeatedly to answer calls puts her in danger. For over a year, nothing Cathy tried made a difference, from calling her previous provider to blocking numbers one by one online. There were just too many different numbers to keep up with daily.

Community Phone’s Allowlist gave Cathy the control she needed.

Cathy found Community Phone while searching for a way to filter who could call her mother’s phone at all — and the Allowlist, a simple roster of approved numbers, was exactly what she’d been looking for. Setup was easy: she plugged in the Base, the small device that connects her mother’s phone to Community Phone’s network, and the Allowlist was active that same day. When she had a little confusion about where to add her family’s numbers, a Community Phone support agent named Michael called her directly and walked her through it.

The first quiet night in over a year.

The service started working right away. The first night, Dorothy didn’t get a single unwanted call, and the next morning, when Cathy’s husband called, her mother said, “You’re my first call today, and I’m going back to bed.” Dorothy hadn’t had a single spam call that evening or morning.

Cathy can now use the app to see exactly who’s called and who hasn’t gotten through, which numbers to be wary of, and who’s successfully reaching her mother. She’s already thinking about adding her sister to the app so they can share the responsibility of looking out for their mother.