Going Hungry : Budget Crunch Forces Nonprofit Group to Curtail Meals to Elderly

Over the past eight months, 91-year-old Evelyn Richards came to depend on a hot meal delivered to her door every weekday afternoon by a driver from the Organization for the Needs of the Elderly (ONE).

Disabled by arthritis in her legs and hands, the West Hills resident has great difficulty preparing her own meals and fears making trips back and forth to the kitchen because she might fall and not be able to get up on her own.

“They give you vegetables, meat and potatoes, and it makes a good meal,” said Richards, who lives with her daughter Connie Forsen, a legal secretary. “And I don’t see anybody at all, all day. That’s why I like to see the guy with the food. He’s a very nice man.”

But two weeks ago, Richards and 40 other frail and incapacitated senior citizens who relied on ONE’s Homebound Senior Home Delivered Meals program had to turn elsewhere for sustenance. An unexpected budget crisis forced the nonprofit group to stop serving 20% of their clients and leave 35 elderly waiting-list applicants in limbo.

“These are the most fragile who are struggling to remain independent, and they need just that little bit of help,” said Marilyn Freed, ONE’s executive director. “This is not a luxury. If that one meal can keep people out of a nursing home, it’s a crime not to give them that meal.”

Each year, a federal grant administered by the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Aging is distributed to 15 service areas throughout the city. Three organizations--ONE, the Department of Recreation and Parks, and the Valley Interfaith Council--are contracted to serve home meals to 716 of the San Fernando Valley’s 186,000 elderly residents.

That’s nowhere near enough meals to meet demand, according to Ann D. Smith, general manager of the Department of Aging.

“This is an issue that is happening citywide,” she said. “The number of seniors in Los Angeles who need home-based meals is increasing, but the money is not.”

Smith said that her $2-million overall budget will be cut by $200,000 next year, exacerbating the problem.

ONE’s crisis apparently arose because of Freed’s desire to serve as many clients as possible. Although contracted to serve 169 people each day at a cost of about $5 per meal, ONE was serving 210 and leaving an additional 25 frozen meals for particularly needy clients to eat on weekends.

Usually, money from other providers who do not serve the number of clients they were contracted to feed is reallocated to those that are serving more than their obligated number. But this year, the budget crunch kept ONE from receiving additional funds.

The number of elderly people requesting meals in the Valley swelled after last year’s Northridge earthquake, when hundreds of calls poured in from seniors and their families who had been relocated or suffered damage to their homes. Many remain on the service rosters.

The Valley Interfaith Council, which serves 640 senior citizens despite being contracted to serve only 387, makes up the money shortfall through an extensive fund-raising program that brings in private money to bolster the city funds.

“I constantly need money from private donations,” said Alma Patotzka, nutrition director of the Valley Interfaith Council’s home-based meals program. “The money from the city cannot meet the growing need of the home-delivered meals.”

But ONE, which offers a variety of services to senior citizens, has been forced to dip into its General Fund to keep the home-based meals program afloat, said Freed. Now she hopes to raise $25,000 from private donors to reinstate the 41 clients recently cut from the service and bring in the 35 others on the waiting list.

That would be enough money to last until July, she said, when the new city budget for home-based meals is announced.

For Richards and her daughter, that would be a godsend, allowing the nonagenarian to avoid eating hastily whipped-up batches of gelatin or having to heat leftover spaghetti.

“It’s not easy for me to fix things because I don’t walk so good,” said Richards. “I take the salad and pudding and I eat that at noon. Then I eat the meal for supper, because my daughter doesn’t get home until 6:30 or 7 p.m.”

ONE’s meal delivery meant Forsen, who works long hours in Century City, did not have to worry about her mother struggling in the kitchen and could rely on somebody checking on her at least once during the day.

Others are suffering similar hardships, according to Keri Howard, ONE’s homebound meal coordinator.

“We have one couple where the husband has dementia and his wife is his caretaker,” she said of a Canoga Park couple. “She can’t do anything for him because she recently had a hip operation. It’s situations like that that are really scary. We want to be able to put (those with) emergency situations on the meals (program) right away, but we can’t.”