By Julie Piper Finley | Director of Marketing & Communications
Thank you for your support of senior nutrition in our community. Meals on Wheels People has seen an 8% increase in requests for Meals on Wheels over the past year. In the past six months, we have served 26,000 more meals than we had budgeted for. The increase has come primarily from Multnomah County among low-income seniors. We also continue to see a spike in the number of "younger" seniors, age 60 to 69. This is due to a number of factors: those who may have lost their job during the economic downturn have been unable to find work; younger seniors who have retired but are financially unprepared for retirement; general poverty among seniors. Our recent client surveys indicate that as many as 25% of the seniors we serve live at or below poverty. This is an indication that the service we provide is not a luxury, but a basic necessity of life for thousands of seniors in the metro area.
What is equally as important as the food, is the friendly visit from volunteers. For many of the seniors we serve, the meal we bring is their only food of the day and the volunteer is the only person they see. Here is a letter we recently received from a client:
"I like to see a nice friendly face each day as I am quite lonely. It's hard to cook for one person, so I am eating better now."
Another senior wrote: "Meals on Wheels People are a blessing in my life!"
Delivering hot meals and friendly smiles is made possible, in part, because of the gifts through Global Giving. Thank you for carring about seniors!
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