FILLING THE GAP
Meals on Wheels is working to serve more seniors as older population grows in county
Before the crack of dawn, John Alton has already secured his hairnet, slipped on his apron and gotten to work cooking enough chicken tenders, spinach and rice to feed 250 seniors.
Alton, who is attending culinary school by night, is the kitchen manager for Meals on Wheels Montgomery County, a nonprofit that prepares and delivers meals to homebound seniors throughout the county.
For him, cooking takes more than just a recipe; it takes a formula. First, he has to look at what ingredients are available from the bulk grocer that week. Next, he must ensure that each meal is nutritious and well-balanced, including a protein, a fruit or vegetable and a starch. And last, but not least, he considers what the seniors like. Pork patties, he learned, were not a hit. Using his rubric, Alton and the other staff members put together 1,250 meals a week, though they have the capacity to make 8,500 if they had the funding.
“We get a lot of positive feedback,” said Allison Hulett, the organization’s executive director.
“He cares about how it tastes.”
With the smell of battered chicken and the sound of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” filling the industrial kitchen at the South County Community Center in The Woodlands, Alton distributes the food into neatly portioned trays and seals them with plastic, before passing them on to the program’s operations specialist, Andre Bailey.
Bailey then organizes the meals into red and blue coolers, labeled by route for the 180 volunteers to pick up and deliver by hand in time for lunch. Filling the gap
Montgomery County is home to more than 62,000 people older than the age of 65. Many, as they grow older, find it increasingly difficult to shop for and prepare their own meals, but are otherwise healthy enough that they’re not ready to move into a nursing home, Hulett explained. Meals on Wheels’ mission is to fill in that gap and provide the help that these seniors need to continue to live independently.
The organization points to a study by Brown University researchers that found that states that spend money on providing meals for seniors have a reduced number of relatively healthy seniors in nursing homes, according to a 2012 Boston Globe article. They also refer to a 2014 study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that found that more than half of seniors who come into hospital emergency rooms are either malnourished or at risk for malnutrition.
“It’s a public health issue,” Hulett said.
Climbing life expectancy rates have put a strain on Social Security and retirement funds, making seniors more financially vulnerable, material from the organization says.
Meals on Wheels has crunched the numbers: a year’s worth of meals, at about $1,300, costs less than a week in a nursing home or a day in the hospital. By helping seniors be well-nourished, thus letting them stay at home longer, Meals on Wheels reasons that they are saving taxpayer money that is used to subsidize medical costs.
“Food is medicine,” Hulett said.
While bringing wellbalanced meals to seniors in need is the primary mission of Meals on Wheels, most volunteers use the drop-off time to give the seniors some much needed personal attention. Special delivery
“It’s more than just a UPS delivery,” Hulett said, explaining how many volunteers go above and beyond to form relationships with the seniors, sometimes bringing them additional groceries and special gifts.
Meals on Wheels volunteers have the dual responsibility of bringing food and keeping a consistent check on the seniors’ wellbeing. Hulett said that volunteers are sometimes the ones to call for medical help or Adult Protective Services when the seniors are in need.
And many volunteers form a connection with the seniors on their route.
“When we have to change the route (and send different volunteers), we hear about it,” Hulett said. “They get really attached to their volunteers.”
In 2015, Meals on Wheels served 736 seniors, about half of whom live in The Woodlands, but still had more than 400 on a waitlist as of last October. While the organization has the capacity to serve many more, the funds to buy the food fall short, Hulett said.
The programs are funded primarily through grants, which account for 48 percent of the organization’s revenue, and support from the Houston-Galveston Area Council, which accounts for 31 percent, but Hulett said the organization is now turning to the community to help eliminate the waitlist. So far, donations have helped shrink the waitlist down to 286 seniors, but Hulett hopes to get enough financial support to feed each senior who needs it.
Program manager Sharma Brown says she hears heartbreaking stories on a regular basis about seniors struggling to make ends meet. Most recently, one elderly woman called asking for meals for her husband because she was too tired from helping him get up and dressed in the morning to cook lunch.
“They deserve that (help),” Brown said. bridget.balch@chron.com twitter.com/bridgetbalch