A Lexington nonprofit called A Caring Place, realized six years ago that older people in Lexington were experiencing chronic loneliness.

The group decided to create a space and community for them to come together weekly to feel less alone.

Our mission is to reach out to the elderly and disabled in the bluegrass community who are socially isolated and therefore probably at very high risk of loneliness.

And all of our program is geared towards building a relationship with them.

It originated back in 2018, and we were originally an outreach from Word of Hope St Martha's Church and we were just looking to see originally what we could do with this huge fellowship room that really was underutilized.

So we thought, Well, we'll just have coffee and donuts every morning and we'll invite the neighborhood in.

The neighborhood didn't come in.

So then it was like, Well, questioning why and looking at our own neighborhood and looking at the different census figures that come from the that are provided by the city of Lexington.

It was pretty obvious that most of them didn't have transportation, and a lot of them were living in one room apartments, not one bedroom, one room apartments.

Those people in that one room apartment with no transportation were probably senior citizens.

These were the same people that could have gone to Lexington Senior Center, except they did not because they met the same objectives.

But they were not independently functional.

So it was like, Well, let's let's see what we can do.

So we're kind of taking the people that fall between the cracks of the Lexington Senior Center.

I'm a retired psychologist and I worked for community mental health, so I ran into a lot of people who whose psychological symptoms would be greatly reduced if they were not so lonely.

Most people don't realize that they're actually suffering from persistent loneliness, which is a very chronic, painful, physically painful type of disorder.

So we gathered them in.

We started most of our things virtually.

So today, that's where we still are.

We have approximately like 60 phone buddies or so at this point.

Individual talking to each of the participants, sometimes depending upon their their stage of loneliness and loneliness comes in different stages.

We might be calling them up every day of the week.

We have what we call a virtual welcome center, and that is a Zoom meeting with our participants and our volunteers.

We come together at 10:00 on Wednesday and Saturday morning.

We have a blue Christmas every year because people have recognized that both wintertime and Christmas is the loneliest time for many, many people.

We decided that that would be part of our mission to do that.

If we feel lonely, well, then we know we need to go out and get people around us and talk to people.

But it can become dysfunctional over time.

And so what happens is that person withdraws, becomes very self-absorbed and lives in chronic pain.

If the community could be more aware of themselves because they could prevent loneliness in themselves, they could help somebody else to prevent it or mitigate it.

That a caring place also provides meals to the elderly.

In Lexington and who face food insecurity.

This past Saturday, it held a volunteer recognition day to celebrate volunteers from the University of Kentucky and Central Kentucky, who have provided 6000 hours of work to help the elderly and disabled communities in the bluegrass area.