Creating connection: Downtown Senior Center and partners help community avoid isolation
SANTA CRUZ >> Kelly MercerLebov, the senior programs coordinator of the Downtown Senior Center at the Louden Nelson Community Center, gets queries these days from eager seniors about when classes such as line dancing will be held in person again.
It wasn’t always that way. Mercer-Lebov and her staff had been running more than 30 daily virtual classes since March 2020 and saw palpable tension and frustration from the elderly they check in with daily, especially around access to the coronavirus vaccine.
The seniors that took online classes including memoir writing and yoga were used to using Zoom and other platforms to maintain some semblance of normal life, but many had friends and family with no access to the internet when vaccine doses were becoming available to them.
“It was virtually impossible for them to schedule (appointments),” MercerLebov said Wednesday. “We were keeping our ears to the ground for any openings that could be able to help.”
Eventually, representatives of the County of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency reached out to the Downtown Senior Center to help navigate the process. They created a simple
signup for seniors, then prioritizing only those 75 and older with complex health issues, and shared it with many senior advocates.
Watsonville-based Community Bridges, which partners with the Downtown Senior Center already for the Senior Center Without Limits program, stepped on to the scene in mid-February to offer a hotline designed to reach out to seniors without internet access who could be helped over the phone. A Google Voice number is provided, where individuals can leave messages asking for help.
The partnership was strengthened when the Health Services Agency reserved appointments specifically for seniors so that the partners could book those times. Mercer-Lebov said that Community Bridges made around 2,000 appointments for seniors in two months. Those 65 and older with complex health issues are still being served. The hotline is being used regularly to work out existing kinks, such as situations where seniors have had their second vaccine appointment canceled and they are unsure how to rebook it.
“It has changed over the last couple of months quite a bit, especially with more and more people being able to access the vaccine and the supply (increasing),” MercerLebov said. “Among the seniors we work with, about 100% that have wanted the vaccine has gotten (the vaccine). That’s just those that we work with on a daily basis.”
Coming together
Mercer-Lebov credited the City of Watsonville, namely its Parks and Recreation Department, and the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County for the ability to keep so many seniors connected and reassured in the last year. As of June, low-income seniors 60 and older can participate in the Senior Center Without Limits online program through the distribution of free Amazon fire tablets. Local internet provider Cruzio helped by providing internet to these seniors as a part of its Equal Access Santa Cruz initiative, a cooperative to help families that need affordable internet.
Today, the nearly 10,000 seniors that have taken classes have been vaccinated for nearly a month. However, Mercer-Lebov has seen the benefits of giving seniors hope before vaccines were distributed as a light at the end of a dark tunnel. She devoted three years prior to the pandemic to raising awareness around senior loneliness and isolation, an issue inflamed as family members stayed away from seniors to preserve their health.
“That loneliness and isolation has really been hard for so many, and so many of our programs that were in person we couldn’t really adapt to the online platform. We kept the time space just to have time to check in, like the walking adventure group,” MercerLebov said. “We hold that space and talk about walks we’ve been on in our neighborhoods and we assign scavenger hunts for them to do every week.”
Because of worry around the solemnity of the holiday season, the Downtown Senior Center adapted to the then-active shelter-in-place order to deliver cookies, cocoa and connection kits. The connection kits included the name of another senior and their contact information with prompts such as two truths and a lie and Mad Libs so they could touch base at least three times during the often arduous time of year.
Mad Libs is a word game that allows players to fill in blanks in place of words to be as silly as they want.
“We were thankful so many of our seniors took the bait,” Mercer-Lebov said.
Similar to the phone pal opportunity, Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County established a “Stay Connected” hotline that seniors can call or schedule calls on a weekly basis. The line is still live at 831-427-5070, ext. 115.
“It’s like a friendship line where they can talk to someone, they can catch up and have someone to bounce ideas off of,” she said. “It’s run by trained volunteers.”
The coordinator said she is grateful that loneliness and isolation has been addressed in a timely manner, but she feels there is still a lot of work to be done.
“We are working hard to bridge the digital divide,” she said.