By Julie Piper Finley | Director of Public Relations
We are continuing to provide meals to homebound elderly in the downtown Portland area during the pandemic. Between May 1 and Aug. 31, 2020, we delivered 62,629 meals to more than 500 older adults. This represents a 75% increase over the number of meals served and delivered during the same time period just one year ago. The increase is due to two factors: 1)more seniors than ever before have registered to receive home-delivered meals since mid-March and 2)we are delivering more food per person. Traditoinally, we bring a fresh meal to each person Monday through Friday. Because we want to limit exposure for both our volunteers and our seniors, we have reduced delivery days from five days each week to just one day. Rather than providing a total of five weekly meals, we are now providing each person with seven meals. This ensures that each person has at least one balanced meal per day.
The pandemic shows little sign that it is slowing down or abating. We plan to continue to keep our neighborhood dining centers closed and to mainatin our current delivery method through the remainder of 2020 and probably at least the first six months of 2021. We have managed to increase the daily production in our Central Ktichen from 5,000 meals daily to 8,000 meals daily and have been fortunate to secure enough funding to make this possible. Our biggest issue at this point is storage -- both of raw product and of packaged meals. We have made arrangements with a local dairy to store some items and have borrowed refrigerated containers that are now pakred at our Central Ktichen for additional storage. This situation is not ideal and we have secured a warehouse in Clark County for storage on that side of the Columbia and are seeking additional storage space on the east side of the Willamette.
To help elimiate the social isoaltion that comes with limited contact with volunteers, we have launched a friendly chat program. More than 800 volunteers have registered to call homebound seniors once or twice a week just for a conversation. This program has proven to be very popular and more than 1,000 seniors throughout the region have signed up for this program.
As the pandemic continues, Meals on Wheels People will continue to provide fresh, healthy food to older adults who are choosing to shelter in place, allowing them to remain independent.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
