Nationwide, demand for Meals on Wheels programs surged throughout the pandemic. In Oregon, the Malheur Council on Aging and Community Services is experiencing rising demand and costs for its program. We hear more from Tom Longoria, the senior programs manager with the agency.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last month, the people who run Malheur County’s Meals on Wheels program called out for help. They told county officials they don’t have enough money to provide meals to all of the older residents who need them. Malheur County is not alone. The national Meals on Wheels organization says that 8 out of 10 local programs are providing more home delivered meals than they were before the pandemic and that almost half need more funding. Tom Longoria is the senior programs manager for the Malheur Council on Aging and Community Services. He joins us with more details. Tom Longoria, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Tom Longoria: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you today.
Miller: Can you remind us how the Meals on Wheels program works?
Longoria: Certainly. Our program is designed around folks who are 60 years old or older or who have a medical diagnosis or disability that essentially puts them in a situation where they’re homebound, making things like grocery runs, going out to pick up their needed items, difficult. So those are our two main criteria: someone that is home bound not by choice and is over the age of 60.
Miller: This is the population that can access the services, but how does the service work?
Longoria: We do a brief intake on anyone that comes in to apply, just getting some basic contact information, what their level of need is. We do provide a quick nutrition screener just to give us a sense of what types of nutrition deficits there might be or what type of support they’re needing. From there, one of our folks goes out to visit with the client in person and does some intake paperwork, which is pretty minimal. It’s about a 30-45 minute visit. And then from there we get them onto a route for delivery, depending on what community they live in. All of our routes are delivered by a wonderful batch of volunteers who donate their time every week to come in and spend an hour or so each day delivering those meals to those seniors. We deliver twice a week in each of our communities, and we provide anywhere from two meals up to seven, depending on the need of the client.
Miller: How many people were you serving each week before the pandemic?
Longoria: On average our caseload was about 60. That was spread across our three main population centers here in Malheur County. We had 60 families and that number stayed fairly consistent. Once we moved into the pandemic stage of things, we found an increased need because a lot of folks, due to the major disaster declaration, became homebound essentially because they were encouraged to not go out. They were under quarantine essentially. So grocery runs and those sorts of things, especially in this population, they’re a very vulnerable population as it comes to medical issues. We saw a pretty quick increase right off at the start because we also, as part of our nutrition program, would host congregate meals. [This was] an opportunity for seniors who were not homebound, who were mobile with less medical conditions, to gather together with friends in a communal setting and enjoy a meal. Once pandemic restrictions went into effect, we had to close those down. But we were able to shift those clients over to the Meals on Wheels program if they were so inclined. At the peak of our client load – I would put this probably at around September of 2020, maybe December of 2020 – we ended up peaking at around 180 clients, which was three times as what we were used to providing for. Our caseload has settled back down into a much more manageable range of about 120. It kind of ebbs and flows depending on the month and people’s needs and living arrangements, but we’ve settled into about 120 clients over the last probably 9-12 months.
Miller: But that’s still double what it was before the pandemic. How do you explain that? The stay at home orders are over. I’m assuming that because of the population you’re serving, meaning largely older, I assume many of them [are] retired or on fixed incomes and so not necessarily having lost their jobs during the pandemic. How do you explain that, nevertheless, the need is still twice as high as it was pre-pandemic?
Longoria: Some of that is due to us broadening our reach. Malheur County is a very rural, almost frontier, county. We have about three towns that make up the larger population centers. As the pandemic hit, we recognized we needed to reach out to some of our smaller communities. So we’ve just broadened our reach, for one reason as far as why that number has increased or stayed increased. The other is, several of those seniors that were congregate clients have remained on the program because we’re still at a stage where we are allowed to have them on that program, minus the homebound requirement. It’s something that’s a convenience. We still have a lot of seniors who remain… afraid might be too strong a word but… concerned about going out into the community still and doing things like grocery shopping or eating at a restaurant. And then some of it is related to cost as far as what a meal runs. This program does not charge seniors to participate over the age of 60, so it could be part of the convenience as well. We expect that when the emergency disaster declaration is lifted that we’ll start to see a bit of a decrease – maybe not all the way back down to around that 60 amount, but somewhere around about the 90-100 number in terms of consumers. That’s just due to the increased number of seniors that are occurring. I looked up a study that I remembered reading a little while back. I re-looked it up this morning: Nationwide, I think through 2030, it’s expected that there will be 10,000 new seniors reaching the age of 65 on a daily basis. This is the baby boomer generation that has now started reaching those ages, and it’s just a major increase in the number of the population.
Miller: You mentioned the increase in the cost of food being one of the drivers of this. What has the highest inflation in 40-something years meant for your program?
Longoria: Well, for the most part, we’ve been able to really kind of minimize that impact up to this point. We’ve only recently started to see that it’s becoming a little more difficult. Our food provider is a local hospital that provides our special-diet meals for our seniors. So, [for] anyone who is on a diabetic diet or on a restricted diet of some sort, we utilize the hospital for those. Then we use, actually, [the] Department of Corrections. We have one of the largest prisons here just outside of Ontario. They have a catering kitchen of sorts that allows us to partner with them, and that keeps our costs pretty minimal in terms of the food. Where we’re starting to see–
Miller: So you’re able to get food from them that they’re buying at relatively inexpensive rates. Food that’s not going to people who are incarcerated there – you’re able to get some of it from them to give to older people in Malheur County?
Longoria: Correct. We actually have a contract established with them. We order up to them the number of meals we need per week and the week prior. They provide that to us in deliverable containers so that they’re easy to use and reheat either in the microwave or in the oven. And then they provide us two hot meals. The meal is generated around a 2000 calorie diet per day, so it meets all of the nutritional guidelines that come along with that. Through their staffing, we’re able to keep costs [low], for food because they’re able to buy in such bulk, and there’s very little labor costs. We’re not paying a cook to do this; the labor cost is pretty minimal because they are using their adult in-custody population to help staff that as well as other staff.
Miller: Maybe this is based on just my understanding from movies and TV shows that’s not accurate, but the sense I’ve gotten is that prison food is terrible. Am I wrong?
Longoria: I would say that you’re pretty incorrect as it relates to the product they provide us. It’s not the same meals that are being provided to the folks who are incarcerated. These are cooked separately and fresh every day. I’ve actually sampled them on occasion, as has my staff, for quality control purposes. It’s pretty good. It’s probably not something that you would get out of a restaurant, just due to the considerations, or that you would even make at home, but it’s not horrible either. We have a pretty good range of menu items that are provided to the seniors.
Miller: What did you hear from county officials when you asked them last month for emergency funding?
Longoria: Well, they were able to take it under consideration. They were in the budget making process, so they were trying to find a way to accommodate that. We’ve not yet heard back from them as to a decision for this fiscal year. In my agency we have another department that provides public transportation. This has been part of their budgeting process due to how they’ve been established. In talking about where we could locate additional funding, it was brought up that we do this ask for our transportation department; maybe that’s one that we can do for our seniors programs. So, at this point, we’re still in the waiting process. They were very positive about the idea. They identified and recognized the need that there is and were very compassionate towards the idea of including us in that budget. But, as of yet, we’ve not heard a decision.
Miller: Has the pandemic that we are still in right now changed the way you think about both social service provisions – providing social services – but also the needs in your community?
Longoria: It has. One of the biggest issues that we ran into is social services is meant to be social. Under the pandemic we were severely limited in what we were able to do. I mentioned we do our intake process in person. I should have clarified that: that was pre-pandemic. We’ve now been able to move back to that, but during the two years that we were doing this, we were doing all of our interactions with current and potential consumers by phone. Our population is not that internet savvy, so Zoom and other video chats were just not really feasible. So we were doing these intakes by phone, and it doesn’t give us a real sense of who we’re seeing and what their needs might be. There’s a tendency for people to minimize their level of need. When we asked, ‘Is there anything else?’ they would say, ‘Of course not. No, this is great. This is all we need.’ Meanwhile they might have just an abundance of other things that we could potentially help with. I think what it really did is it just really highlighted for us how isolated we are. Again, a lot of our areas are on the rural side of things, borderline frontier level of population space. Your next neighbor, your next source of assistance, is pretty far away and unable to really do that. It just really highlighted how quickly people became so isolated under this pandemic and how much that face-to-face contact is really necessary.
Miller: Tom Longoria, thanks very much.
Longoria: I really appreciate your time. Thank you for the opportunity today.
Miller: That’s Tom Longoria, senior programs manager with Malheur Council on Aging and Community Services.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.