Heart2Heart Outreach of South Florida is facing the issue of loneliness and isolation in older adults head on.

From phone calls to meal delivery and Sunday services, this nonprofit mobilizes volunteers to connect and engage with the older community, providing an invaluable lifeline to so many.

Joining me now to share more about their work is Pastor Juan Gallo, Executive Director and CEO of Heart2Heart Outreach.

What great work you guys do.

Thank you, Arlene.

I appreciate you inviting us on the show.

Absolutely.

So let's talk about the mission of Heart2Heart Outreach and how it relates to the role of faith.

Absolutely, yeah.

Our mission is to provide hope, share love, and restore purpose to the aging population.

The way we do that is that we recruit volunteers to CARE, which is our acronym for connect, advocate, respond, and engage.

As far as faith is concerned, we are faith-based organization founded by Sean Stepelton from the Stacy Foundation 13 years ago.

And so the idea originally, for the first nine years, kind of this flagship program, was to bring volunteers from churches to CARE centers or ALS, kind of brick and mortar, traditional type long-term care living to visit with folks who are lonely or seen potentially their end of times.

And so faith always kind of comes back around, we notice, towards the end of a person's life.

Wow, that's pretty incredible.

And you do take a holistic approach, a social emotional model.

Tell me about that in the role of volunteers and all that.

Yeah, so we believe that isolation is a silent killer among seniors.

Studies show that over 30% or about 30% of the people or seniors in the United States live alone.

And when faced with isolation, there's chronic disease that can lead to, that could be a part of that.

So we just believe that looking at a person socially and emotionally is part of what makes their life better.

Give us an overview of the programs and how you do make that happen.

So we have different programs, right?

One of them is called Heart2Heart Drivers.

These are people who have a heart for seniors, but they sometimes get really sad when they come in contact with a senior.

As a matter of fact, years ago, I interviewed someone for a volunteer coordinator position.

She went inside to one of our centers, and she came out crying because she saw that some of them were just kind of so lonely.

And she's like, "I can't do this."

And so for some of those people, and they're not all like that, but they'll just drop off, right?

They might make pen pals, they might drop off groceries, they'll do that kind of stuff for us.

The other thing that we have is through COVID, we called all of the people we served and said, "Hey, how can we help?

You guys are isolated.

What's the best thing?"

And their response was, we need tablets and we need 3D goggles.

That was the two responses that we got.

So they're like, "I think we can do tablets, right?"

And so a buddy of mine on the board, Eddie and I, we went to Best Buy and we said, "How many tablets do you have?"

We bought 'em all.

And from that turned into a partnership with Apple and a comfy called BFA and Jamf.

And so now, we have 250 iPads.

Aside from the tablets that we'd already bought, which was about 200.

And they're in different CARE centers, and they have games in them that help the seniors with cognitive type of mind stimulation.

And then we also do something where it's like a FaceTime, but it's through Zoom, but it takes out the Zoom protocol stuff where you gotta send links, and all they need is a phone number and an email and it pops right up.

Wow, so even though COVID is gone, it's still something necessary, because Absolutely.

It's not as rampant as it was, but I'm sure it's still affecting seniors.

Well, what we're also noticing is that seniors have gotten to the point now where they're becoming tech savvy themselves.

And because of that, they're also becoming victims of things like scams through emails and that sort of thing.

So that's a big part of our focus as well.

And if they're isolated, they're much easier to fall victims.

Absolutely.

So the volunteers are even essential when it even comes to things like that.

Absolutely.

What is the most in demand program?

So we did start a meal program 10 months ago in partnership with Offerdahl's, where we did kinda like a pilot.

We were getting a lot of phone calls through COVID saying, "Hey, I have money for food, but I can't leave my house," or, "I just don't have food," or, "The food that I have, it's high in sodium.

My doctor says I can't have it."

So we were trying to look for a healthy solution to that.

So we partnered with Offerdahl's Off-The-Grill, and they were already doing something with the local AAA, and we did 10,000 meals with 67 seniors.

But I think our most on demand program is anything that has to do with CARE.

So CARE is our flagship program, coming to visit, looking at that senior holistically, how do we connect with them, how can we advocate for them, how can we respond to their needs daily, and how can we engage with them through other people or through resources?

And seniors call us all the time.

It used to be that we used to have to go find seniors.

Now they just find us on Google or through word of mouth or through church, and they say, "I'm really lonely."

And I have seniors call me all the time.

"So and so came by for two hours, but can someone else come?"

So I would say that's our most on demand thing, just visits.

Gosh, it really tugs at your heartstrings hearing this.

Yeah, absolutely.

What is the change you see in them?

What are some of your success stories?

Oh, we have so many.

One thing that we do, it's hard to quantify and even put metrics behind something that's social and emotional.

So what we did was we started doing a UCLA loneliness scale when we meet somebody.

And if they score high, we do that scale again in three months.

And we quantify, okay, are our volunteers making a difference?

Because we had a lady who was diagnosed with a severe muscle dystrophy condition when she was 15, put into a long-term care center.

We met her in her late 40s, early 50s, so it's not what you would consider senior age, but she's living in one of the centers that we visit.

And it turns out that two of our volunteers cared about her so much that they ended up adopting her, and they moved to Virginia.

So now the next thing is, how do we get her from here to there, because she's incurved in a way that she can't really move?

And so what we did was we raised funds, and our donors were so generous, and we paid for a $15,000 custom made wheelchair for her that allows her now to to sit in comfortably because she's incurved.

And so that's just one of the many stories, but that's kind of one that sticks out and we're proud of.

So heartwarming.

Yeah.

You flew her down, made her her own wheelchair, and to this day, this is the first time I've ever heard of adopting an older adult.

Yeah, yeah.

That's beautiful.

There's an old saying that says, "Twice a child, once a man," right?

And it's like that with our seniors.

I mean, you hear about orphans, and you hear about children and it's a beautiful thing that we do with them.

But when also with seniors, it's almost like you wanna advocate for them, but you also wanna kind of treat them with that same tenderness you would a child.

Of course.

And not only that, but you recently were awarded a federally funded contract for meals.

Tell us about that.

We were, yeah, it's exciting.

So Region 10, AAA, Area Agency on Aging, for the first time, which is Broward County, has opened up a consumer-driven program.

So what that means is that for the last 39 years, the same provider has held that food contract, and they did great.

But now, we wanna offer because South Florida's a melting pot of people.

And our seniors want something that's to their liking.

And so we are actually the subcontractors for Offer Dolls Offerdahl's Off-The-Grill that has a nutritious menu along with Padrinos.

And then we also are with Sushi Machi, also known as Medley Food Group that has an Asian-Latin Fusion.

They're a big name down in Miami as well.

And they were all providers that were already providing food through emergency COVID meals.

And so we're the back office.

So what that means is that we provide the case management portion of that program.

So we're gonna go out to the houses, assess the seniors, and this is also an opportunity for us, because it allows that senior to then kind of gateway into our other programs, not just food.

Helping people one meal at a time, one older adult at a time.

Thank you so much for all you do, Juan Gallo with Heart2Heart Outreach.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Absolutely.