The Board of Directors of CSNT voted on November 1st
to end the esteemed program, citing over $35,000 in losses during 2017, and an
outstanding debt of more than $250,000 dating back several years due to losses
caused by the program.
Every person reading this remembers Meals on Wheels as a program
that provided hot meals every day for those who couldn’t leave their home. Food delivered right to the door, with a
smile from a familiar face, and a kind word of acknowledgment, if not
encouragement, was a daily ritual as important as any other to those on the
receiving end.
Staffed primarily by volunteers for ninety percent of its time
in existence, it meant something to those making the delivery as well. Providing a daily contact, checking on
someone’s wellbeing, and bringing what might be the only daily meal, was a
special event that made delivery drivers feel quite warm inside.
So, what happened?
Somehow, we let our culture change. Somehow, we let our daily grind become more
important than service to others, particularly our elderly. I’m hearing terms like YOLO (you only live
once) and WIIFM (what’s in it for me) as I try to figure out what happened to
our beloved Meals on Wheels.
Let me take you through a look at the program, its challenges
and changes, and perhaps you can see what happened. Be warned, it is too late to save it, but
this, instead of a treatment, might serve as an autopsy, allowing us to learn
things that just might prevent us repeating this process with other programs.
Let’s start with a fact that may be surprising. In two Texas counties, particularly Williamson
and Burnett, the Meals on Wheels program has over four hundred volunteers. In Cass, Camp, Marion, Morris, Panola, and
Harrison Counties, collectively, there are zero volunteers.
Let’s explore one idea that may have caused this.
The vast difference between the two areas of Texas is as simple
as urban versus rural. Williamson and
Burnet Counties are more suburban than urban, but they have tons of business,
schools, population, jobs, and people with time on their hands.
The aforementioned Northeast Texas counties have much less of
these things, and it shows.
The rural setting that harvested little to no volunteerism over
the last decade is not an indictment on the people who live there. It’s just simple actuarial fact. People are getting older, retiring, and
volunteering less.
We could stop there, and say we have found the reason, so let’s
close up shop and be done with it.
Not so fast, I say.
Using this excuse is the coward’s way out. There are many factors at play here other
than mere demographics.
Let’s look at who tried to help us. We reached out through the media to get
financial help. Collectively, in six
counties, we raised forty-five dollars during an online campaign, and every
dollar was from a CSNT employee.
We petitioned all six counties in which we delivered meals through
Commissioners Court. Less than $5,000
total. Only Camp and Morris Counties
responded with funds. They each gave us
25 cents per eligible person in their county.
Yes, twenty-five cents.
We asked for volunteers.
Nothing.
We approached rich people.
We got fifteen hundred dollars.
If you add all the donations we have asked for specifically for
the Meals on Wheels program for the last ten years, and presented it as a daily
dollar figure, it would be less than a penny per day. At our peak, it took several thousand dollars
per day to run this program.
The government gave us money, didn’t they?
The government gave us $4.95 per meal delivered. To deliver one
meal costs about seven dollars when you have no volunteers.
So, if you do the math, losing two dollars per meal, per day,
can be quite costly, especially when you are delivering more than a thousand
meals per day. Multiply that times 240
days of delivery each year, and that’s a loss of a quarter million dollars per
year.
We found ways to keep our losses to under an average of forty
thousand per year, but the losses just kept adding up. I remember one year, we lost one hundred
seventy-five thousand dollars.
Some may wonder about all the other money we get. It’s public knowledge that our agency
receives close to ten million dollars each year from the federal government, so
what’s the problem?
The problem is, your milk money is your milk money, it’s not for
candy.
Federal dollars must be spent only on certain things. You cannot use one program’s money to pay for
another program’s expenses.
Head Start gave us a $4.5 million program this year, then gave
us $3.5 million to get it done. We had
to come up with the other million on our own.
Yes, we do that every year.
The feds gave us $2 million to spend on utility assistance in
twelve counties, but not one dollar of that can be used for Meals on Wheels.
That’s just the nature of federal grants. People who violate that rule usually end up
wearing orange jumpsuits in federal prison.
Volunteerism then, becomes the engine that makes Meals on Wheels
work. When it leaves, it takes the
program with it.
At one point, Harrison County had about two hundred
volunteers. We hired one person to
coordinate that, so it would be a well-oiled machine.
All was going to plan until one day, we had to change some routes because a paid driver resigned.
All was going to plan until one day, we had to change some routes because a paid driver resigned.
When the paid driver’s routes were reassigned to the volunteer
group, the first set of volunteers complained because the route was in a ‘bad
neighborhood.’
When I asked if we had an unsafe neighborhood on our routes, it
was explained to me by the volunteers that it “of course was unsafe, there’s
nothing but minorities in that part of town.”
That was the last day I allowed that group of people to volunteer
for our program. That group of people was from a local church.
As time went on, volunteers became more insistent on which
routes they wanted to deliver, and the reasons for such made me furious.
Within a year, no volunteers.
There are some things I just won’t tolerate. Racial bias is at the top of my list.
With that story behind us, we were always recruiting
good-hearted volunteers, but to no avail.
Sometimes we would get well-meaning citizens wanting to help, but they
were eligible for the program themselves, so that was no good.
One of the reasons getting volunteers was a little tricky was
the condition of the roads on which recipients lived.
A delivery vehicle’s suspension has a useful life of about eight
months traveling up and down the back roads of our counties. Thus, repairs to our vehicles were high, and
often.
One of our funders was leasing vehicles to us, and expected us
to pay for all the repairs for vehicles that were no longer fit for the
road. This caused us to part ways with
one funder years ago. We were losing so
much money working with them, the parting of ways was beneficial for us, but,
it was not enough.
To save time, money, and vehicles, we needed a new delivery
system. It would include delivering only
once per week. One hot meal and four
meals to be saved for later.
We went to every recipient on every route and talked to them
about receiving a hot meal and four meals that could stay in their cabinet or
freezer until heated and eaten.
We provided some samples of each, and over ninety percent of our
recipients requested the ‘shelf stable’ meal over receiving a frozen meal.
We requested a waiver from the Department of Aging and
Disability Services (DADS). We got the
waiver, changed our delivery model, and actually started losing a lot less
money.
This continued for two years.
We were actually digging into our debt.
We had reduced our debt in that program from $470k to $270k in just a
little under two years.
Somewhere in another state, an agency was delivering ‘shelf
stable’ meals that did not meet the nutrition requirements as set by federal
law.
DADS then decided to stop issuing waivers for that type of meal
delivery. Because we had no choice but
to operate under a waiver, DADS chose not to offer us a contract in 2016.
Over four hundred recipients immediately stopped getting meals
every day. To this day, many of those
people still do not receive a meal.
For the last year, CSNT has served a meal per day to an average
of 114 recipients. We still lost money.
In November, the Board of Directors voted to stop the
bleeding. We notified our two insurance
companies who pay us for those 114 recipients that we could no longer deliver.
They went to work quickly to find other ways to provide
nutrition for their clients. All has
worked out, and I feel confident those clients will be properly served by their
home health care providers.
Some people may still get a meal every day, but it’s not from
us. Some people choose Mom’s Meals, but
we don’t recommend it. Some people,
hopefully, have family and friends who care enough to be what we cannot, to
help when needed, to feed when hungry.
You may only live once, but everyone deserves to live that life
with dignity and with the highest degree of independence possible.
Our heartfelt love goes out to all home-bound persons we have
served over the years. We will miss you.
At the time of this post, Dan ‘Lucky’ Boyd,
CCAP, NCRT was Executive Director of Community Services or Northeast Texas,
Inc., a Nationally Certified ROMA Master Trainer, a Certified Community Action
Professional, and a National Pathways Peer Reviewer. Boyd is also a general
partner of Adams Boyd Consulting, LLC., First Vice President of the Texas
Association of Community Action Agencies, and President of the Community Action
Association of Region VI.
