For nearly 40 years, Store to Door has helped homebound seniors and adults with disabilities in the Portland metro area by taking orders for groceries and delivering them each week with a team of mostly volunteers. These “Kindness Couriers,” as the nonprofit calls them, will enter clients’ homes — if requested — to unpack the groceries and stay for a brief chat. Those interactions can help ease feelings of social isolation for the clients, most of whom are low-income seniors living alone. In July, Store to Door will offer the grocery delivery service on a sliding scale, with no cost for clients facing the greatest financial need.
During the pandemic, Store to Door began offering clients free weekly phone calls made by volunteers through its Friendly Caller program. The calls are intended to foster regular social connections that may evolve into friendships between volunteers and the clients they serve.
Joining us for a discussion about Store to Door and the communities it serves are Program Director Cass Listro; Board President and Kindness Courier volunteer Jeri Janowsky; and Gloria Nussbaum, a Friendly Caller volunteer.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland nonprofit Store to Door was created in 1989 with a pretty simple idea: Deliver groceries to people in low-income senior housing who are unable to shop for themselves. Store to Door has expanded its services in the last 36 years, but its mission remains constant: To provide food access, social connection, and support to homebound seniors and adults living with disabilities.
Cass Listro is the Store to Door program director; Jeri Janowsky is the board president and a delivery or Kindness Courier volunteer; and Gloria Nussbaum volunteers as a Friendly Caller, meaning she makes regular phone calls to socially-isolated clients. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Jeri Janowsky: Thank you so much.
Cass Listro: Great to be here.
Miller: Jeri first, as both a volunteer and board president, how do you describe Store to Door?
Janowsky: Store to Door gives seniors the ability to remain in their homes, if that’s what they would like to do. [It] gives them some social connection and some support, in the sense of if they have something they need, somebody’s coming to the door every week. They can ask and we can refer them for extra services. The whole idea is to have respect for elderly and disabled as they enter those final years so they can have what they want from stores – their favorite foods, clothes that they need, etc. – and to provide that connection for them.
Miller: Cass, who do you serve as a nonprofit?
Listro: We serve primarily seniors, but we also serve adults with disabilities. Our client base is about 80% over the age of 65.
Miller: How has this organization changed since 1989?
Listro: Oh my gosh, it’s grown so much. Store to Door started out as a very small service just delivering groceries, and we’ve expanded our services over those years. Now we offer a grocery delivery service, we have a food box delivery service, we have a Friendly Caller program, and we have a resource referral program that works to connect clients to services outside of Store to Door. So it’s a much more robust service offering.
Miller: Can you describe how the originating food delivery piece works today?
Listro: On Mondays and Tuesdays, we have a team of order takers. We have about 80 order takers who call all 500 of our clients individually on the phone and take their order live, enter it into a database.
Miller: And so that would be somebody living alone saying, “yes, this week I want two cans of tuna fish again, a can of tomato soup and a loaf of bread” – I mean, it gets specific?
Listro: It gets so specific.
Janowsky: Way more specific than that.
Miller: OK, so what am I missing?
Listro: It gets all the way down to like the color of the packaging, the exact brand, and the size down to the ounce. We are so specific for our clients.
Miller: And this is not online, this is not going to a Fred Meyer app and clicking on things. This is one human talking to another human, and that second human is writing stuff down.
Listro: Exactly, yes.
Miller: OK, so step one is order taking. What’s after that?
Listro: So then all of those orders get processed and they come to the store with us on Wednesday and Thursday. We have another team of shoppers – we have about 65 shoppers per week – who come to the store, and they shop those very specific, very detailed orders to make sure all of our clients are getting exactly what they’re asking for. And then we have another team of volunteers, our Kindness Couriers, who come in, pick up those orders, and hand deliver them to clients.
What’s special about our Kindness Couriers is when they make that delivery they’re really taking the time to connect with clients. They’re opening jars, they’re putting groceries away, they’re unpacking things into the refrigerator, they’re maybe staying for tea, sometimes taking out the trash.
Miller: It’s possible that you’ve just answered this next question, but it’s worth digging down a little bit more. Jeri, I mentioned at the beginning, you are one of these volunteers, a Kindness Courier, for the nonprofit. But when the nonprofit started in the late ‘80s, I don’t know what kind of home delivery options there were. I imagine they were very limited compared to now. Even just pre-pandemic, in the 2010s, there were various versions of home delivery. And then the pandemic hit, and there was just an explosion of opportunities and ways and businesses that sprung up to make it so basically anything somebody wanted could be delivered to their home.
So how is what you’re doing now once a week different from, say, Instacart?
Janowsky: So first of all, I don’t have a client that could probably use Instacart with a computer, and sometimes –
Miller: You mean in terms of the technological fluidity or fluency?
Janowsky: Correct, and to get exactly what they want. And then in addition, that Instacart person probably leaves the groceries at the door. We go in if the client wants us to. The thing of opening bottles for elderly is really huge. We speak with them, [ask], “how are you doing, have you had visits from your family?” So we become friends and then also we ask, “is there anything you need?” And I observe if there’s anything that I’m concerned about that I may want to refer back to Store to Door, if somebody needs more support in any way. Those are the kinds of things that are hard with just a computerized delivery system.
Miller: Do you have a sense for how many of your clients might not have anybody else in their home besides you over the course of a week?
Janowsky: I would say almost all.
Miller: For almost all of them, you’re the only person that they might see over the course of a week?
Janowsky: I think there’s one that might have a physical therapist that comes in, but for many of them, they don’t speak with anyone for the whole week other than their order taker or a Friendly Caller.
Miller: How would you describe the relationship that you develop with these different clients?
Janowsky: Each client is different. There are some who say, “Thank you for the groceries. I love it that you’re here. Bye.”
Miller: And that’s on the porch – you’re not going in.
Janowsky: Yeah. And then there are other clients who I have wonderful long conversations with. I learn about their past, they ask about my vacations, and we become friends. I really enjoy seeing them. I have a client that I call first before I deliver just to make sure that she’s there and ready, and I just love it because when I called this week, she said to me, “you are my favorite person to talk to first thing in the morning.” And I’m like wow, what a way to start my day.
Miller: Gloria Nussbaum is here as well. As I mentioned, you’re a Friendly Caller. How do you describe this program?
Gloria Nussbaum: I describe this as sort of like StoryCorps. I know that StoryCorps right now is working with something where it says talk to a stranger and record a story about the 250th anniversary. What I get to do … I never knew any of these people before I got a client list. And that list had the person’s first and last name and their phone number, and that’s all I knew about them when I made my initial call to them and explained that I was the Friendly Caller.
I talk to the same people each week – once a week on Friday afternoons, which is what I’ll do when I leave the studio today – and we just chat. I tell them [to] please be an open book with me and we can chat about anything you want. I will share with you about my life, and I would describe them at this point as my friends. In fact, when I call them and they can see that it’s me calling, they go, “Oh, hi, Gloria!” We’re like, it’s Friday again, and here we are, and we just chat.
Miller: These are people who have signed up to have some kind of a telephone-based human connection?
Listro: About a third of our clients have opted into the Friendly Caller program, so not everybody does it. But I think the folks that do feel like they get a lot out of it.
Miller: Gloria, these are strangers. I mean, you’re a stranger to them at the beginning, they’re a stranger to you. How do you get them to open up and how do you provide what clearly they want? They’ve signed up for this because they want some kind of a human connection. So how do you foster that?
Nussbaum: Well, I’m a personal historian. I’ve spent the last 20 years interviewing people and so this felt like an absolutely natural fit. I come with at least 1,000 questions
Miller: In your head or written down? [Laughter]
Nussbaum: Both. And it starts out with, “How has your week been? Did anything interesting happen? How are you feeling?” We just kind of generally give each other an update. And from there, it just flows. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’ve been told I’m good at this, and apparently my clients think that’s true. We talk about everything. We talk politics, we talk religion, we talk weather, we laugh together, we almost cry together sometimes. It’s all about relationships. That’s what I see this as. I feel like these are my friends and we’re just sitting down with a telephone and chatting.
Miller: Am I right that you’re in your 70s right now?
Nussbaum: You are.
Miller: So am I also right in saying that you are definitely closer in age to the people that you’re talking to than somebody who’s in their 20s or 30s? I mean, you’re talking to people in their 80s or 90s.
Nussbaum: And that makes me the perfect age to be a Friendly Caller.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Nussbaum: What I mean is we talk about the past, where did they grow up. And I can say, “as you were growing up, did your family have a party line?”
Miller: A shared telephone line where you could pick it up, and other people might be using it and you’d overhear them?
Nussbaum: Yes, exactly. But a person who’s much younger than me wouldn’t have a clue. I actually talked to one of your producers yesterday, or the other day, as he was interviewing me about this interview. I said I can talk [to clients] about a ringer washer, and he had no idea what I was talking about or what a ringer washer was. All of my clients know exactly what I’m talking about.
All of that to say I feel like this is the perfect age to be doing what I’m doing with the people I’m doing it with because we can relate. And we even have health challenges that are not unfamiliar. A quick story: Some weeks ago, one of my clients – I think he was maybe having a difficult time or something – he said, “I’m older than dirt.” And I said, “but you’re several years younger than I am.” [Laughter] I couldn’t resist.
I’m an extrovert and it’s just easy for me to ask questions. The thing I would just like to emphasize too is that the most critical piece of what I do is to listen. To listen to the answers, to ask follow up questions, to empathize, to listen with my heart as well as my ears. And to me, that’s the most critical piece of what I do.
Miller: It’s interesting that you talked about StoryCorps. I should say – and I’ve said this before – that’s a radio (and more) nonprofit where I worked when it was starting out 20-plus years ago. One of the mantras or mottos of StoryCorps then, and maybe now, is listening is an act of love. Do you believe that?
Nussbaum: I absolutely believe that, with all my heart. Because we’re in a society where we don’t listen to each other. It probably seems crazy to even say that because everybody sort of understands that, but we don’t. And you know, the other thing about listening is it takes time. It takes pauses. It takes some silence to allow the other person to fill in that silence and to share whatever it is that they want to share, so yes.
Miller: Cass, to go back to just some of the nuts and bolts of this, am I right that if there isn’t some kind of demonstrated financial hardship, your clients pay for their food and they pay for the delivery? This is not a free service, people are not getting, in general, free groceries through this?
Listro: Yeah, so clients do pay for their own groceries. We’re actually really excited because we have a new delivery fee model right now, where starting in July, we’re able to offer a $0 delivery fee to our lowest income clients, and we’re so excited to unveil this. I think it’s going to make a really big difference for folks.
Miller: You also did mention a free Food Box Program that’s a part of this as well. So how does that work?
Listro: Yeah, so Food Box order takers, just like I described with the grocery delivery service, call clients on Fridays and Mondays the week before their delivery. Clients choose a week that works best for them. So they’ll say, “I want a Food Box delivery week one,” and they can plan on that delivery happening so that they can accordingly adjust their budget and make sure it stretches to the end of the month. Those orders go in, they are packed with our partner organization, Nourish Oregon, at their food pantry, and then we deliver them on Fridays to our clients.
We are also able to offer emergency Food Boxes. If a client is having a food emergency and they need something right now, they can call us and they’ll get a delivery the same week they request it.
Miller: Jeri, to go back to what we are really focusing on with Gloria, the connection piece, the loneliness piece of this … One of the big reasons, as you were saying, is that what you’re doing as a volunteer is different than what people can get from Instacart. There are a lot of obvious societal changes over the last 40 years that have led to this. It’s complicated, it’s multi-factorial. It has to do with people living longer, with people moving more, people not necessarily being in the same place as their kids. But do you see structural societal changes that would make it so fewer people who are in their later years are experiencing this kind of loneliness and solitude?
Janowsky: And, I would say in addition, experiencing right now the cuts in the SNAP program is really making this need even more so.
Miller: That’s the food insecurity piece layered on top of it and an ability-to-make-ends-meet piece, which is on top of people being more sort of socially isolated.
Janowsky: I think as people get more comfortable with using their phones for social connection, there may be some help with this, but I don’t think for any of us, it’s the same as having a face-to-face friend. And I think that will be something that we all need.
Miller: Has doing this work as a volunteer and as a member of the board affected the way you think about your years to come, about aging?
Janowsky: Yes, quite a bit. And every week I return home and think a lot about –
Miller: – About living your life now in a way that will lead to less loneliness, isolation in the future? What’s an example of what you’re doing?
Janowsky: Yes. One example is having some younger friends, and really trying to maintain strong friendships, so that we will call each other when we need to. I think that’s absolutely critical. In writing, really maintaining email contact with those that are far away. I think it’s changed a lot.
Miller: Gloria, what about you? You called yourself an extrovert. Has doing this work affected the way you think about your years to come?
Nussbaum: Probably so, in that it’s important to have relationships outside of family. To have community relationships, with clubs or groups, or going to the gym. I’ve got my gym group, those kinds of things. I think it just makes me aware that we just need each other no matter how old we are.
As I’ve been saying recently, I don’t want to be any younger, I could just use a better body. But also, I’ve never been this age before. So we all have to kind of, in some ways, figure it out. And I think it’s true of the clients that I work with, make the phone calls to, they seem to really look forward to these phone calls each week, and if I’m not going to be around, I tell them. A week or so ago my first grandchild got married and that’s going to be what we’re going to talk about this week. They’re going to say, “How was the wedding? Tell me all about it.”
So relationships – I don’t know any other way to describe it.
Miller: Gloria, Jeri and Cass, thanks so much.
All: Thank you.
Miller: Gloria Nussbaum and Jeri Janowsky are volunteers for Store to Door. Jeri is also the board president of the nonprofit. Cass Listro is the Store to Door program director.
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