Group has filled the void of other meal delivery services at no cost for 25 years
‘Our guardian angels’
His small home is filled with intricate geometric paintings and light-catching collages, many of them landscapes, painstakingly created with brightly colored shards of glass. There are papiermâché longhorn skulls and rows of bottles holding shattered glass, beads, scraps of metal. And there are books scattered about. Richard Serrano, a multimedia artist, is also a voracious reader.
He writes poetry. He philosophizes. Once, he was a musician, but he doesn’t hear so well now.
Not long ago, Serrano, 61, was an athlete. He used to ride his bike up Hyde Park Road to the Santa Fe ski basin, a route he completed more than 200 times, he said in a recent interview: “I was a stud.” He laughed and glanced down at his thin legs.
About eight years ago, Serrano was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Last month, doctors determined he actually has muscular dystrophy, another debilitating disorder. “It’s a different train on the same damn track,” Serrano said in the slow, quiet speech of a man whose voice struggles against the effects of his condition. “You learn to adapt.”
His spirit is resilient. But there are things Serrano’s body can no longer do — pedal his bike up the mountain, for instance. Cooking is also out of the question. His muscles don’t cooperate well enough to safely manage a knife. He recently cut his finger.
“I hate blood,” he said, drawing laughs from Haila Harvey, a volunteer with the nonprofit Kitchen Angels who delivers meals to Serrano.
For the last three and a half years, Serrano has been receiving meals from the organization, which has filled a need in Santa Fe for 25 years: delivering hot, healthy meals to homebound people who don’t qualify for other food aid programs, or have special dietary needs that other programs can’t accommodate. Clients of Kitchen Angels have no close relatives or friends who can regularly shop and cook for them.
The group has delivered 1.2 million meals, at no cost to clients, since it was founded. It serves about 180 meals each day and hundreds of clients in a year. Some, like Serrano, have chronic medical conditions. Many are undergoing cancer treatment or recovering from
surgery and require the service temporarily. Others are in hospice care.
As Santa Fe’s aging population steadily increases, so does the need for Kitchen Angels’ help. In recent years, Executive Director Tony McCarty said, the demand has risen by about 13 percent annually.
As the growing organization celebrates a quarter-century in the community, it also is preparing for the next 25 years — or at least the next five. A construction project is underway at the nonprofit’s facility on Siler Road, an effort that includes a kitchen expansion and a remodeled space for its kitchen goods resale store, Kitchenality, whose revenues help feed dozens of clients each year, McCarty said.
The nonprofit, which has just four paid staff members, also has been working to expand its base of volunteers. In an average week in 2016, a report says, more than 250 people donated their time to help prepare and deliver meals, allowing frail and isolated people to remain living in their homes.
The Kitchen Angels board, in the process of drafting a five-year plan, is also considering ways to help other Northern New Mexico communities provide similar services, McCarty said, particularly those in rural areas, where poverty rates are higher and access to food is more scarce.
“The service we provide is so vital, so necessary,” said Lauren Laval, the nonprofit’s volunteer coordinator.
If you are living alone and struggling with a disability or illness, she said, “you could very well starve in your home. … The more I work here, the more I see other gaps in services.”
When it was founded in 1992 by a trio of people who recognized a need for the service — Tony D’Agostino, Leise Sargent and Anna Huserik — Kitchen Angels was intended only for people under 60, McCarty said, because older residents can qualify for programs such as Meals on Wheels, a national food program for senior citizens that is operated locally through the city and county governments.
But many seniors have dietary needs that such programs, with a one-size-fits-all approach to mass meal preparation, can’t accommodate.
Kitchen Angels expanded its client base, accepting people over 60 who seek vegetarian meals, those who have certain food allergies or suffer from health conditions, such as heart disease, that limit their diet, and those who need their meals to be chopped or puréed. Meals are prepared from scratch daily.
The organization is now serving more clients over 60 than those who are younger, McCarty said. The trend is expected to continue as the number of elderly rises, with local baby boomers now in retirement and more retirees from across the nation choosing to spend their golden years in the City Different.
Recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show the median age in Santa Fe County has increased by nearly a decade since 2000, to 46. More than 22 percent of the county’s
population was over 65 in 2016, the data show, far higher than the state average of 16.5 percent and the national average of 15.2 percent. A Santa Fe County report released in 2016 projects that 33 percent of the county’s residents, some 60,000 people, will be over 65 by 2040.
“Hopefully,” McCarty said, “we’ll be prepared for the onslaught that is coming.”
On a recent afternoon at Kitchen Angels, 74-year-old Harvey and other volunteer drivers loaded up meals for their routes — packages of turkey with black bean salad and vegetables; chicken with peach sauce, quinoa, yams and coleslaw; beets and fennel, and roasted asparagus.
Earlier in the day, Harvey, a board member, had helped prepare specialty meals at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center’s commercial kitchen, where cooks have been stationed since construction work at the nonprofit’s facility displaced them a couple of months ago.
Sprouts Farmers Market also has been helping the organization during the building overhaul, Harvey said, preparing
some of the meals.
Lorraine Vigil, 52, one of the clients on the route Harvey has been driving once a week for a decade, praised the food that she and other volunteers deliver. The chicken enchiladas and the stews are her favorite dishes, Vigil said.
Vigil lives with her elderly father and her small schnauzer, Clementine. Her father walks with a cane and she’s in a wheelchair, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, as well as diabetes and kidney disease. A dozen years ago, she had a kidney transplant, she said, and feels lucky to be alive.
But neither Vigil nor her father drives. Getting meals had become a challenge, until she learned about Kitchen Angels.
“Kitchen Angels literally are our guardian angels,” she said. “We would be living on Spam.”
Another client on Harvey’s route, an elderly woman who lives alone, told Harvey she had dreamed about Kitchen Angels recently. In her dream, she said, she had been running across a field of green grass, trying to get home in time for her Kitchen Angels meal.
As she headed to her next stop, Harvey reflected on the people who depend on the nonprofit’s food aid. “I don’t know what they would do if they didn’t have the service,” she said.
Serrano, whose home on Lopez Street is usually the last stop on Harvey’s route, said Kitchen Angels isn’t just about the food.
“You’d be surprised how important it can be to have the routine of someone knocking on your door,” he said, “calling you on the phone, calling you by name.”
He spends most of his time alone in the Lopez Street home where he grew up. Most of his family members have moved out of state, and Serrano can’t easily get out to see friends.
His physical decline has been devastating, but more difficult, he said, has been adapting to the isolation.
Kitchen Angels has provided him with a corps of companions. “They really care,” he said. “They’re sincere. And you can never have too many friends.”