Charity hails response as it cooks up plan to feed the elderly

ACHARITY in Galway has seen a ‘great response’ to an initiative which allows people to buy a meal for an elderly person stuck at home as a result of the outbreak.

The charity Cope Galway, which helps the elderly, the homeless and domestic abuse victims, launched the appeal last week, asking people to buy a homedelivered, freshly made meal for an older person who may be unable to prepare their own food during the coronavirus crisis.

The charity said it is working to get meals delivered to homes that are made with the nutritional needs of older people in mind.

A main meal, soup and dessert, costs €12 through the charity’s website with the option to pay for a week’s worth of meals.

A week’s worth of lunches and dinners for an elderly person would cost €75.

Speaking to the Irish Daily Mail yesterday, the head of development with Cope Galway and cofounder of Meals4Health, Sharon Fitzpatrick, said: ‘We only launched it a week ago and it has been a great response so far, both in terms of people purchasing meals or making donations, and in terms of people kind of just sharing the information about what we are doing.

‘It’s been a really good response and really good just in terms of letting older people know the level of service that is available to them which has increased significantly as a result of the coronavirus.’

Ms Fitzpatrick added: ‘While it’s not good that people need to avail of the service, I suppose, if you are in a position where you are an older person or you’re on your own, or even just somebody living with chronic illness, this level of nutritional support is available to you.’

The charity supports thousands of people across Co. Galway.

THE demand for its services has increased so much in recent days that the organisation has had to scale up operations across the board.

‘We put a call out for volunteers; specifically, we looked for chefs because we need to run a second and possibly even a third production shift to be able to cope with the increased demand for these services,’ said Ms Fitzpatrick.

‘Within 24 hours, we had calls from about 24 different chefs.

‘People who are not working at the moment... volunteered their time to come in and work our kitchen and that is really heartening as well.

‘We’ve had chefs, we’ve had ordinary people who are happy to come in and work as kitchen assistants preparing vegetables and preparing food. Drivers are the other thing because obviously all of these meals have to be delivered to people at home.’

Ms Fitzpatrick said that the majority of her colleagues are in frontline services, so many of them are still out there doing their jobs while most of the country tries to stay at home.

She added that the current crisis is having an impact on the charity as it has been forced to scale up its services, while at the same time its fundraising efforts have had to be curtailed.