Meals on Wheels volunteers stop to listen
Seniors appreciate being able to tell stories about their families and medical problems
LOCKPORT — On paper, it doesn’t look like Judy Kepner’s Meals on Wheels route should take very long. Drive to the house. Deliver the meal. Repeat.
So why does it take her two hours to deliver to nine people in Ransomville?
Because a big part of being a good volunteer has nothing to do with meals or wheels; it’s all about listening.
“For a lot of people, it’s the only person they’re going to see all day,” said Christopher A. Richbart, director of the Niagara County Office for the Aging.
That’s why Richbart was pleased to learn recently that Niagara County’s home delivered meal program for senior citizens received a boost when Wal-Mart presented the county a $2,500 grant.
Richbart said the money will be used to help retain the lifeblood of the program: the volunteers who drive the meals to homes of seniors all over the county.
“We deliver over 350 meals a day. We need to get more volunteers and keep the ones we have,” Richbart said last week.
About 70 volunteers use their own vehicles to take meals to the homes of appreciative seniors such as Eileen Heinze, 82, of Lewiston.
A widow since 1997, Heinze said she has been receiving the county’s precooked meals since December, when she underwent surgery for a fractured hip.
“The time of planning a meal and cooking it, then the cleanup, it’s just too much,” Heinze said.
Kepner, a Wilson resident who has been a volunteer delivery person for the last two and a half years, brings Heinze’s meals as part of her Ransomville-area route.
“Judy and the other home deliverers are just special people. They’re very friendly and they have little stories. I look forward to them coming,” Heinze said.
Kepner, who started driving meals after retiring from the Office for the Aging, said many senior citizens use her and the other volunteers as sounding boards, talking about their medical problems, their families and their memories.
Richbart said volunteers don’t have to work every day, but it would help to have more, because some of the routes are becoming too long.
“We have volunteers that are doing 22 or 23 [meals per day], which is really stretching it,” Richbart said.
The meals are cooked in the kitchen at the Niagara County Jail once the inmates’ breakfast is done. Glenda Reardon, the county’s registered dietitian, is in charge of the menus. Richbart said Reardon is a stickler for proper nutrition.
“All the meals have to have one-third of the recommended daily requirement for vitamins and minerals,” Richbart said.
Richbart said the department is flexible and willing to handle each client’s situation. Some receive only one meal; others receive food only on certain days. His department does an assessment of each person’s situation before adding them to the delivery list.
“It can be short-term or long-term,” Richbart said. “We do what we need to do.”
Kepner said a volunteer typically must go to one of the county’s food depots to collect the meals at about 10:30 a. m. on a weekday; there are no weekend deliveries.
Richbart said the meals prepared at the jail are taken to the depots by county trucks. The pickup sites are the county Public Safety Training Facility in Lockport, the John A. Duke Senior Center in Niagara Falls, the Bishop Gibbons Apartments in North Tonawanda, and sites in Gasport or Olcott, depending on the day.
The county serves about 1,000 meals per day, counting those served at sit-down sites that seniors visit all over the county. The county employs a head cook, a cook and a cleaner to work full-time on the senior meals at the jail kitchen. There also are seven part-time cooks and 10 part-time food service helpers. Richbart said 16 people work each day.
He said the county suggests a donation of $2.50 per meal, which is collected at the sit-down sites and mentioned in monthly statements mailed to the home meal recipients. Those who can pay mail their payments to the county; the volunteer drivers are not allowed to collect money.
The county pays volunteers the standard mileage rate set by the Internal Revenue Service, which currently is 55 cents per mile. Part of the Wal-Mart grant was used for small volunteer appreciation gifts, such as canvas bags and business portfolios.
It will also pay for food at a volunteers’ picnic Friday. The county also will use some of it to advertise for more volunteers, including radio and cable television appearances.
Niagara County was one of 80 nationwide recipients of grants from Wal-Mart’s anti-hunger campaign. Richbart said the county plans to work with Wal-Mart for some volunteer recruitment events, including an effort to find volunteers among Wal-Mart’s own employees.
Sandee Shakarjian, a greeter at the Lockport Wal-Mart for 13 years, was one of those interested. She tagged along with Kepner on her visit to Heinze’s home last week.
“This is quite a program. I’d like to get involved with it when I grow up,” Shakarjian joked.
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