JACKSONVILLE — A restive crowd of 70 people recently filled the Whitingham Municipal Center in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week.
For most of them, it was just a normal Thursday when, for a voluntary contribution of around $3, they drove to Jacksonville to share a nutritious, home-cooked meal with family, friends, and friends who have become like family.
But on this particular afternoon, their numbers had swelled. After 19 years of preparing and serving a sit down lunch and delivering meals through a Meals on Wheels program three times a week, Senior Solutions, based in Springfield, Vt., had announced that come October, it would no longer be able to provide this service directly.
Anila Hood, the nutrition and wellness drector of Senior Solutions, was on hand to explain why.
The bottom line, Hood explained, is that the three-day-per-week meal service in Jacksonville is the only “direct service” of meals that Senior Solutions manages on its own anywhere in Windsor or Windham counties. At all of its other sites, the agency contracts with vendors to provide these services, and simply reimburses the vendors a fixed rate per meal.
Hood laid out the numbers to demonstrate the consequence to the agency's bottom line of providing meals as a direct service rather than through a contract partner.
Each meal prepared at the Jacksonville site costs Senior Solutions close to $12, Hood said, compared to the roughly $4 per meal that it reimburses vendors for each meal. Further inquiry helped clarify that the first number is how much it costs Senior Solutions to put food on a plate; the second is how much the agency contributes to the costs that its contract partners spend to put food on a plate.
Thus, $12 is Senior Solutions' total cost for each meal - including administrative overhead, salaries, mileage reimbursements, food, packaging, fuel, rent, and any other costs - when it feeds people as a “direct service.”
At all other sites, contract partners assume all of those costs, and receive about a $4 reimbursement per meal from Senior Solutions - which Hood said, on average, makes up half of the contract partners' costs. It thus falls to the contract partners to make up the difference through direct payments from constituents, donations, grants, and any economies of scale the partners can take advantage of in their food purchasing or production.
In this way, Hood said, Senior Solutions meets its state mandate to find “efficiencies” and “stretch the dollars.”
Many questions
In conversations with attendees prior to Hood's remarks, and in the flurry of questions that she fielded, at the top of many people's minds was the extent to which rent charged by the Town of Whitingham to use the Municipal Center has increased the cost of the meals.
Whitingham currently charges Senior Solutions $6,500 per year - or roughly $40 per day - to use the municipal center's kitchen and dining facility. Hood said this rent is strictly for the use of the space, since Senior Solutions pays its staff and reimburses its own volunteers to clean the kitchen and dining room after each meal.
Sherry Adams asked, more than once, “If people paid a little more, and the rent were eliminated or reduced, and we got donations of produce from local farmers, would that make enough of a dent to permit the program to continue?”
Hood insisted that it wouldn't but said she didn't have the numbers at her fingertips to explain why.
Other people pressed Hood on why their program was being cut when, from what they had read online, the agency's federal dollars had increased.
Hood explained that the demand for senior services has increased exponentially and thus even with an increase in funding, it still has to find a way to stretch its dollars equitably across all communities and services.
People also expressed concerns about a shift to partners whose food would introduce an institutional feel to what is currently more like a home-cooked meal.
Hood responded by focusing on the agency's willingness to consider all options and by emphasizing that whether prepared on- or off-site, in small or large batches, any food served through the program will have to match the same rigorous nutritional standards the food now meets.
Finding efficiencies
After the meeting, Hood shared with The Commons a spreadsheet that breaks out the costs underlying the $12 cost-per-meal of running its program in Jacksonville.
At first glance, the spreadsheet confirmed that even if one eliminates the rent and increases the cost to seniors from, say, $3 to $5, there is little movement on the cost per meal.
But closer analysis reveals that this cost is based strictly on the agency's total expenses of about $65,000 divided by the approximately 5,000 sit-down meals it served in 2015 - without including the $15,000 in income the agency receives from attendees in the form of their voluntary contributions.
Reached by phone, Hood acknowledged that the $12 price tag didn't take into account this income, and explained it simply as the way the agency's finance director “chose to do it.”
She further acknowledged that once you factor in that income, other changes do appear to make a considerable dent. For example, under that scenario, if one eliminates the monthly rent and increases the voluntary contribution from $3 to $5, the price per meal in the congregate setting at the Municipal Center drops from $12 to $6.
But, Hood said, that neither reflects the whole picture nor resolves the whole problem for at least two reasons.
First, Hood repeated that the agency has been under pressure from the state for some time to bring its costs in Jacksonville in line with its costs elsewhere in the state. Thus even at $6 per meal, the Jacksonville program would continue to consume a disproportionate amount of Senior Solutions' limited funds.
As she noted during her presentation in Whitingham, the agency disburses funds based on how many meals it serves - and the numbers have been steadily, and in some cases, exponentially rising. But the money the agency receives from state and federal funding sources is fixed - without regard to how many mouths it feeds.
Second, the number of congregate meals served to diners at the Municipal Center accounts for only about half of the number of meals prepared at the site and delivered to people at home.
In 2015, for example, Senior Solutions served just over 5,000 meals to seniors dining at the center, but sent another 8,000 meals out to area homes. And while the average diner at the Municipal Center contributed about $3 per meal, the average recipient of a Meal on Wheels contributed only 77 cents.
Hood explained that since Senior Solutions is footing the bill for both kinds of direct service, it's difficult to tease out all of the costs and suggested that it may therefore be misleading to look at the congregate dining costs in isolation.
Nevertheless, Hood made clear that Senior Solutions isn't giving up.
“If we saw more support,” from the towns it serves or from the community directly, if the agency could “get the cost down to a sustainable level,” then, she said, it might be able to “work with all of that. Senior Solutions would consider anything to keep the site going.”
Food and friendship
So who are the people who come to the meal?
On this particular Thursday, the attendees included people from Whitingham, Halifax, Readsboro, Wilmington, Dover, Marlboro, and Greenfield, Mass., and many of them mentioned friends who regularly attend from Searsburg, Heath, Mass., and as far away as Turners Falls, Mass.
The age range of the attendees appears to be as wide as the geographic range they represent. There was a woman who looked to be in her mid-50s who said she started attending the lunch in her capacity as an aide to an older senior, but who has since found her own community of friends among the other attendees, and a 97-year old former Navy Captain from West Dover.
Falling somewhere between those poles was Richard Hamilton, a longtime Marlboro resident and the former owner of the Skyline Restaurant on Hogback Mountain. And Hildur Murdoch of Jacksonville, who could trace her participation in these kinds of community meals back 30 years to when they were just potlucks in the Jacksonville Sunday School.
There was Winifred and Larry Francke, both 90-years-old, from Readsboro. At first, Mrs. Francke deferred questions to her husband because she couldn't hear so well -- not a surprise given the din of voices in the large open space and the pre-lunch calls of “Bingo!” - but with a little encouragement, she held her own just fine.
She explained that they'd been coming to the Whitingham senior meals for 16 of its 19 official years, including during the many lunches, consisting of soup and a sandwich, served in the basement of a nearby church. For them, the lunches serve equally their need for good food and good company, since, she said, “I can't see, [so] I can't cook.”
There was Ernest Matt of Marlboro, who has been attending the lunches for a little over a year - a consequence, he said, of his wife of 65 years having developed Alzheimer's and, he good naturedly joked, of him having never “taken Home Ec.”
But jokes aside, he was one of the many who emphasized that the meal program made it possible for him and his wife to eat better than they can at home on cheap frozen meals.
MaryLou LaPlante, whose husband is the pastor of the Jacksonville Community Church, noted the many needs served by the meals program. Yes, it's about getting a nutritious meal a few times a week, she said, but many attendees either can't or don't eat as much as they're served and so save half of it for supper, thus significantly stretching their dollars. But, echoing the comments of so many others, LaPlante emphasized that it's the camaraderie and companionship that is at the heart of the program's success.
Other attendees, like Billy Bromley also expressed concerns about the very real effect on his wallet if the meals program ended, given that $3 simply can't buy this kind of food elsewhere. And he, like others, was as confounded as he was concerned: If they had the money up til now to cover the lunches, where did it go? And, he added, if money was an issue, why hadn't they asked people to contribute a little more than $3 to help sustain the program?
What's driving the changes now
Hood explained to the assembly that the Whitingham program wasn't “being singled out.” To the contrary, she said, the Whitingham program had, in a manner of speaking, been operating on borrowed time for more than a decade.
She said that Senior Solutions has been actively looking for a partner to take over the Whitingham program for several years - indeed, the original push to move from direct to contract services dates back to 2002.
Why, then, several people asked, are we just hearing about this now?
In a follow up conversation, she explained that the problem was being brought to the community because the agency's efforts to identify a partner had been unsuccessful for so long.
And, she went on, Nancy Zschirnt - who has been the coordinator and cook of the Whitingham program for almost as long as the program has existed - has been aware of the long and unsuccessful effort to find a partner to take over the program, and had advocated for the community to be brought into the loop, given that the situation had reached a turning point. Zschirnt didn't return a call seeking comment.
Although it is the most frequently offered lunch in the Deerfield Valley, the Whitingham program isn't the only area meal supported by Senior Solutions.
For example, Joan Courser of Halifax partners with the agency to host the monthly senior lunch at the Halifax Community Club. Courser, who was there to hear Hood speak, said that 25-50 seniors attend the Halifax lunch each month.
Reached by email, she described the Halifax program in greater detail, which information highlights the degree to which some of the area programs operate on a shoestring budget and thus are heavily dependent on community support and a corps of volunteers.
Courser reports that the agency approached her in 2000 to see if she would be interested in coordinating the monthly lunches. Her seed money? Just $100, and that's been the amount she has available to purchase and prepare food that meets the same nutritional guidelines as any of the other Senior Solutions-sponsored meals program.
Other than a payment of $40 for the once-a-month use of the community club (which, she said, probably doesn't “cover the full costs of the electric, heat, LP gas, water, etc.,” especially during the winte,- thus making the use of the community club a truly “community function.” The only other payment from Senior Solutions is a small stipend and reimbursement for her time (shopping, cooking, cleaning) and mileage.
To the group assembled at the Whitingham Municipal Center, Hood offered Brattleboro Senior Meals as an example of the kind of program that she suggested might take root in Deerfield Valley.
And, from the way she spoke about it, she left the impression that it was a grassroots effort by the Brattleboro seniors to claim the program as their own that kept it alive.
How Brattleboro did it
Chris McAvoy, the Executive Director of Brattleboro Senior Meals, confirmed that that impression was spot on.
McAvoy was hired by Senior Solutions (then known simply as the Council on Aging) in 1997 and ran the Brattleboro meals program as an employee, much as Zschirnt currently runs the Whitingham program.
In 2002 and 2003, according to McAvoy, the agency said to the people in Brattleboro what it is saying to the folks in Whitingham now: “You're spending [or costing] too much money.”
And like the Whitingham program, McAvoy said the Brattleboro program was “thriving” at the time, with 30 meals being served daily in the congregate dining setting and 60 meals being delivered, daily, through its Meals on Wheels program.
The agency's suggestion was to partner with FitzVogt, a New Hampshire-based company that operates three commissary kitchens in New England, which, its website says, “allows [it] to service both congregate and home delivery programs,” with “hot, nutritious, 'home style' meals.”
McAvoy said that to say that this proposal “didn't sit well” with the seniors in Brattleboro, would be an understatement. But, she said, the seniors channeled their anger productively, forming their own 501(c)(3) and becoming the contract partner Senior Solutions was looking for.
McAvoy's own role in the new venture was awkward and tenuous at first, she said.
As an employee, she said she couldn't engage in fundraising to maintain the program in its then-current form, but her status also prevented her from directly joining the effort toward independence. It therefore fell to individual community members to lay the groundwork for the new entity.
McAvoy credited a retired chemist and a retired attorney for securing non-profit status and clearing some of the regulatory hurdles for the fledgling group. She credited the Town of Brattleboro, which, in exchange for $500 monthly rent, provides access to the kitchen and dining room facilities for breakfast and lunch every day, office space and custodial services in the dining room.
She credited her board of trustees, which is responsible for fundraising, including its annual appeal. McAvoy also credited Senior Solutions, which provided $7,500 in seed money (the program's to keep so long as the site remains open) - and which, through its schedule of per meal reimbursements, contributes approximately $130,000 per year, or roughly half of the program's total costs.
The rest, she said, is made up of contributions from participants, donations, grants, and the program's continued hunt for opportunities to establish its own contractual arrangements to provide food to other similar organizations.
But most of all, she credits the seniors who used the moment as a rallying point. “We couldn't have done it if the seniors weren't behind it.”
And while, she said, the program has had its ups and downs, the Brattleboro meals program is now in its 12th year of independent operation.
A week after her presentation to the Whitingham lunch crowd, Hood reported having fielded a couple of tentative - and at the moment, anonymous - inquiries from interested parties in the area.
And so, she concluded, “I remain hopeful.”