After nearly 50 years of providing Meals on Wheels services to the Dayton region, Senior Resource Connection ceased operations on June 30.
During those years, it provided nutritious, weekly meals to over 600 seniors and worked with 14 dining locations in the area.
With the closure, a Columbus-based nonprofit is stepping up to continue meal services in Dayton.
"We're delivering, right now, frozen meals that go out a week's worth at a time. And we're also giving them milk, juice and breads and things like that," said LifeCare Alliance President and CEO Chuck Gehring. "They've been very kind to us. The people have been very excited that there is a replacement for the previous provider."
Gehring said they are also working to employ many of the Senior Resource Connection's former staff displaced by the organization's closure. The organization's WARN notice stated that the mass layoff affected 190 employees.
“We have hired at this point about 20 of their drivers, and we've got a few more in the pipeline that are thinking about it," Gehring said "We want them, and they're getting paid the same amount that they were per hour, and they are getting the same mileage rate.”
LifeCare Alliance has been running its own branch of Meals-on-Wheels in central Ohio for years. Gehring said before they took over Dayton's clients, their organization offered around 8,000 nutritious meals a day to clients across Franklin, Champaign, Logan, Madison and Marion counties.
"About 7,000 of those are senior meals and there's another thousand which are kids meals," he said. "We do a lot of the Head Start sites and things like that in central Ohio."
LifeCare Alliance is now also providing meals to to Miami, Greene and Darke counties. Gehring said they started test deliveries July 9.
"We have therapeutic meals, we have renal meals, we have diabetic meals, things like that. And so we had to get everybody's information and figure out what's going on," he said. "I can tell you today there's a lot of cars roaming around the four county Dayton area delivering meals again."
This is not the first time they have expanded their meal services in Ohio.
"We took on Champaign and Logan counties back in 2013 when that agency went broke and they needed the service," Gehring said. "So there's not a lot of groups out there that want to take these on. They're not moneymakers, as you can imagine, but we're happy to help."
Gehring said they are still in the early stages of providing Senior Resource Connection's clients in the Dayton region with the meals they need. But he is hopeful they will be able to meet those needs as they continue to reach out.
“We were notified of this pretty late in the process. We wanted to be seamless, but we did the best we could," he said. "We've done a lot in the last month. You can't believe what we've had to do in the last month.”
The cost of this expansion is partially covered by federal funding through the Area Agency on Aging.
"Older Americans Act money is what we have right now. It comes from the feds, it pays us by meal, it pays is so much a meal," Gehring said. "We bill it monthly and it's capped so that's only going to cover a part."
Gehring said they’re actively working to raise money to cover all aspects of providing meal services across Dayton.
“Besides the cost of making the meals and things like that, we're buying some trucks that will eventually get logoed and you'll see them roaming around Dayton," he said. "And we need a warehouse somewhere.”
Gehring said if anyone in need has not been contacted by LifeCare Alliance, he encourages them to reach out for future meals by calling (614) 437-2898 or via email through Dayton@LifeCareAlliance.org.
