This story is part of our March 2026 issue. To read the print version, click here.
Sheri Peifer
President and CEO, Eskaton
As president and CEO of Eskaton, the largest Northern California-based nonprofit senior living provider, Sheri Peifer knows a thing or two about today’s aging populace. She tries to match their boldness with her own in creating and running communities where older adults can live with purpose and joy.
Peifer always liked being around older people. Growing up on Philadelphia’s Main Line, she learned how to crochet from an 88-year-old neighbor, and she found older adults refreshing and authentic. “They’re comfortable in their own skin,” says Peifer. “We become more ourselves as we age.”
Raised in a musical family (her parents were both music educators), Peifer sang and played the piano and clarinet. She met her husband, Scott, at Messiah University, a private college in Pennsylvania. After graduating, they followed friends to Lodi. While he got his graduate degree, she worked for a senior living company in the San Joaquin Valley. By the time she was 25, she was an administrator, overseeing a staff of 85 (many of them twice her age), while going to Sacramento State for a master’s in gerontology. It wasn’t easy, she says, recalling that period as one of her “crying times.”
“We become more ourselves as we age.”
The couple moved back east, but after a few years they missed California and returned to Sacramento. Setting her sights on working for Eskaton, Peifer wrote her own job description focused on strategic planning, market feasibility and operations. Hired in 2005, she was named VP of strategic planning two years later.
Meanwhile, Peifer and her husband started a family: first a son, Corbin, now 18, followed three years later by twin boys Jonah and Reid, both 15. Working and raising three children under the age of 3 was another one of her crying times — “the hurt locker years,” she now fondly calls them. She wore her twins in a baby wrap around her waist that left her hands free so that she could work. The twins are now 15, but the experience stays with her. “I have deep compassion for women as they juggle an executive role and motherhood,” she says. In her limited spare time, she sang soprano with RSVP, an a cappella choir. She doesn’t really believe in work-life balance. “There are going to be heavy times and light times. You just have to take care of yourself.”
She stepped back from the choir in 2023 when she became president and CEO of Eskaton, in charge of 23 senior living communities with 4,500 residents, 1,500 employees and $180 million in annual owned and managed revenue.
As CEO, she focuses on creating not just housing but community. That means amenities and spaces like on-campus bars and bistros where residents can connect with one another, along with programs that foster intergenerational connections and dignify aging. At a recent forum for Consumnes Oaks High School students, the teens got to ask questions of the elders. One resident told them about publishing her first book at 93; another described the joy of finding love after the death of his wife of 50 years.
Peifer faces numerous challenges in her work, including a labor shortage, rising insurance costs and the growing aging population. To address the labor issue, she recently hired Eskaton’s first chief people officer, and last October she traveled to Europe with a group of senior living CEOs to learn more about cutting-edge practices such as “care farms,” which combine gardening and animal care with residential living for people living with dementia.
Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is emotional. “We don’t do easy work,” says Peifer. “It can be filled with heartache, but it’s deeply fulfilling. I’m humbled when I think of the service we provide.”
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