Neighbors Who Care fosters independence
This is one in a series of profiles of Arizona nonprofit service organizations that have received funding from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com’s Season for Sharing fundraising campaign. To donate to this year’s campaign and help Arizonans in need, go to sharing.azcentral.com.
Neighbors Who Care, a Chandler nonprofit, says its mission is to provide “the comfort of home and the dignity of independence” for older adults who need a little help.
The organization was established in 1994 to assist older adults who are homebound or disabled. Neighbors Who Care recruits and trains volunteers to provide non-medical assistance. Organizers call it a neighbor-helping-neighbor approach.
Services are provided at no charge to the client and include evening-meal delivery, transportation to medical appointments, help with shopping and errands, respite service for caregivers, daily calls, minor home repairs and inperson welfare checks.
Neighbors Who Care also sponsors a free weekly caregiver-support group and conducts monthly community-education forums and driving-safety classes.
“This is the only program of its kind in the southeast Valley, and it has drawn participants from as far away as Florence and Maricopa,” Executive Director Eric Ehst said.
Question: How was the program developed?
Answer: Concerned residents in the unincorporated community of Sun Lakes noticed that some of their neighbors were homebound and could no longer get out to get groceries or to medical appointments. Most of the people we serve reside in areas that are not served by Dial-a Ride, Meals on Wheels, public transportation or other municipal services. We incorporated as a charitable nonprofit in 1999. We continue to survey the community to identify additional unmet needs.
Q: How many individuals does your nonprofit help each year?
A: We have approximately 1,400 homebound, disabled and frail seniors eligible for assistance in our database, and we add more than 300 new clients each year. Our over 400 active volunteers provide services to almost 700 of these individuals on about 18,000 occasions annually.
This includes about 5,000 rides to medical appointments, including 1,000 trips to dialysis, and delivery of over 8,000 hot evening meals for people who are unable to cook for themselves. Our volunteers donate almost 20,000 hours of their time and 150,000 miles on their personal cars each year.
Q: How do you gauge your success? A: Our average client has been in the program for over five years, receiving services that allow them to remain independent in their own homes instead of having to move to some sort of facility or move in with family. Our longestserved client has been receiving our help for 22 years. She has multiple sclerosis and lives alone. Without our support, she would have been forced into an institution.
In 2018, we undertook a comprehensive survey of the clients we serve and found universal approval for the assistance and treatment they have received. We routinely receive unsolicited cards, notes and testimonials from clients with words such as, “Thank you for coming to my rescue,” “I can never thank you enough” and “Without your help and kindness, I’d be in a home.”
Most of what we can measure quantitatively is outputs (number of rides, meals, etc.). These continue to rise year over year. Quantifying outcomes is difficult. The one clear outcome measure we have is for our hospital-discharge support program. The 30-day readmission rate for those we help has, for almost five years, been less than 2 percent. The local readmission rate for all Medicare enrollees is 15.6 percent.
We have won many awards from the community. In 2012, Neighbors Who Care was honored to receive the inaugural Encore Prize from the Virginia G. Piper Trust for innovation and excellence in engaging people age 50 and older in roles that combine personal meaning with social impact and fill pressing human-resource needs. In 2014, we received a national STAR Award for outstanding volunteer transportation services and a Maricopa Association of Governments Desert Peaks Award for public-private partnerships. And in 2015, we won an Arizona Fast Pitch Award for outstanding nonprofit innovation.
Q: How many employees do you have?
A: We have five paid employees: executive director, case manager (a professional social worker), communityoutreach manager, office manager and meal-delivery coordinator.
Q: What is your greatest need?
A: Our greatest need has always been additional volunteers, particularly those willing to give homebound neighbors a ride in their car. We constantly need to replace volunteers as they age out or move away. The number of active volunteers is slowly declining, while the number of clients and services needed continues to rise.
We also need to increase our fundraising as our workload and expenses continue to rise while many traditional funding sources decrease or dry up. We are community funded with about twothirds of our funding coming from local donations.
Q: How did you spend your Season for Sharing grant?
A: The funds allowed us to recruit, train and screen 100 additional volunteers to meet increasing program needs and to expand the services provided to our disabled and homebound clients.