More than a Meal - Keeping People Safe and Healthy in Their Homes

Meals on Wheels of Loveland and Berthoud is guided by a single goal - to support our aging and homebound neighbors, and extend their independence and health as they age. Our main focus is to provide home-delivered meals to older adults in our community. However, we also have the unique opportunity to respond to the many specific needs of our clients by providing regular safety and wellness checks and connections to other community-based services that may be essential to keeping them safe and healthy in their homes - concrete ways we are ‘More Than A Meal’ for many.

One specific way we are working to strengthen and build on our current impact is through the launch of our Friendly Visitors program. In our last Direct Mail newsletter, we shared how we developed this pilot program to address the issues of isolation that many of our homebound clients face. While we are still working on the final structure of the program and looking for ways to expand it, we wanted to share one of its ‘More Than A Meal’ success stories - a concrete example of how Meals on Wheels is changing lives for the better!

A Story from One of Our Friendly Visitors - “P”

“We met “J” while on our regular Meals on Wheels route. We were excited to be paired with him on the new Friendly Visitor’s program.

J has a caretaker that contacted me when she found out that we would be seeing J on a weekly basis, beyond our meal delivery schedule. She was so excited that he was going to have a regular visitor. She asked if we could work on getting J out of his apartment. He lives in a small apartment and doesn’t get out very often.

The first few times we met with him, we sat on his apartment patio. He enjoyed talking, hearing the birds chirp, and looking at all of the flowers that were blooming.

In our visits, we noticed that there was a group from his building that met regularly outside for coffee. We joined the group. J has made so many new friends! At first, most of the people didn’t know him because he never left his room. As weeks went on, we saw how much J was enjoying visiting with other residents.

We visited J last week, and some of his coffee friends shared how excited they were that J had attended their potluck lunch all by himself. Today when we went, he was staying in the cafeteria with his friends to eat chicken with noodles that one of them was cooking.

It is so wonderful to see him socializing - he seems so much happier now.

We are really blessed  with the friendly visitor program - because like J, we have made many new friends as well!”

A perfect example of how Meals on Wheels is nourishing lives beyond providing nutritious meals!