From affordable healthcare to food insecurity and social isolation, we look at the biggest issues facing our older adult population and the local organizations helping them live a life of dignity and wellbeing.

That and more, stay with us as we dive into Your South Florida.

Hello and welcome to Your South Florida.

I'm Arlene Borenstein, filling in for Pam Gigante.

Adults aged 65 and over, known as the baby boomer generation, are one of the fastest growing populations in the nation, expected to reach more than 80 million people in 2040.

Here in Florida, this generation makes up more than four and a half million people, the second largest population of older adults in the U.S. And while many older adults continue to lead full and healthy lives well into their later years, the natural effects of aging remain, including cognitive and physical decline.

For those older adults living on a fixed income or in poverty, these health issues are only made worse by the rising costs of living and healthcare.

And the lack of social interaction also plays a major role.

The CDC calls loneliness and isolation in older adults public health risks, leaving this population with increased risks of premature death, dementia, and suicide, among other serious medical problems.

Today, we'll explore how these issues are impacting South Florida's older adult population, and meet the people helping older adults and their caregivers navigate the challenges that come with aging.

Joining me now to share more is Trish Ernst, Communications Director for the Area Agency on Aging, Palm Beach/Treasure Coast, and she works with Daiana Bruno, who is the helpline manager also at the Area Agency on Aging.

Thank you guys for being here.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for having us.

Let's start off with if people are unfamiliar with the organization, what should they know about it?

Arlene, the Area Agency on Aging is an outgrowth of the Older Americans Act.

There is one available to every adult in the United States.

Depending on population, in Florida, we happen to have 11 because of our very large senior population.

Our mission really is to advocate and support seniors, also adults with the disability, and certainly those who care for them.

The goal, of course, is to help them remain independent, living with dignity, and have resources for their wellbeing.

That's such a beautiful thing that you guys do.

What would you say is the biggest issue your clients are facing?

Sadly, at the moment, food and shelter are really the greatest needs for the urgent calls.

Always, there is a need for in-home healthcare, home delivered meals, and sort of transportation to and from doctor appointments and such.

But food and shelters still remain the top needs.

Basic necessities, really.

What would you say are the most in demand programs and resources?

Certainly, with our agency, it's the helpline.

The helpline really makes up about half of our staff, and Daiana can delve certainly more into that.

I was gonna say it's a perfect segue to Daiana.

Exactly, exactly.

What can people can expect when they call?

They can expect a live person to answer their call.

A specialist will answer with compassion and empathy that will provide information and resources based on their need.

And what is the process?

If someone picks up the phone and finally decides to make that step, what can they expect?

Sure, so our specialists will answer that call, and we'll talk to them, try to find out what their needs are.

If they are looking for in-home services, we do manage the state priority list.

We are the gateway for the Medicaid long-term care program that provides community-based services, as well as financial assistance to pay for an assisted living.

What are you hearing from the community as their most dire needs, their most important needs right now?

Sure, I'll piggyback with what Trish said.

Transportation is one of the biggest need, housing, food assistance, and in-home services.

And it's probably a very rewarding job.

You get to career, you get to speak to people who call in needing help and you kinda walk them through that process.

Tell us some of those success stories.

Sure, so I've been with Area Agency on Aging for 11 years.

I think I've heard so many rewards story, which is the reason why I continue to stay with this agency.

Recently, we had an 85yearold woman call a helpline feeling very depressed, and overall, very lonely.

Didn't have no one to help her bathe or dress, clean her home.

And our specialist was able to connect her with resources.

And recently, she sent us a letter showing her gratitude, stating that we've become her angels, her light, and no longer is feeling alone, because she does have someone coming in every day to help her.

Trish, you probably have stories as well.

Daiana, 11 years, that's commendable.

That's amazing.

And Trish, I'm sure you've worked right alongside people every day.

Absolutely.

And I do have a story I'd love to share that comes actually from our Foster Grandparent program.

Our Foster Grandparent program matches low-income seniors with atrisk special needs children, and they volunteer in the classrooms under the guidance of the classroom teachers.

Many success stories having to do with children's progress.

But this success story is one of our volunteers, Marianne Meyer, who has been a foster grandparent I think for more than five years.

Wow.

She is a cancer survivor.

And this year, she was named and celebrated as the outstanding senior volunteer for the Palm Beach County School District.

She's known as Grandma Mary, and we were invited to be there for the celebration, which was a complete surprise to her, by the way.

And so touching.

And she is such a dedicated, extraordinary woman.

We have really almost a hundred like her who are serving at-risk children in the schools.

So very proud of that program.

Wow, Grandma Mary, we have to have her on next time.

Thank you, Grandma Mary.

Grandma Mary.

And what is it like for these kids who get this influence, this extra help, this mentor almost as a grandparent?

It is absolutely a mentor.

They do mentor and tutor.

They have a curriculum for each child.

The teachers are really the ones who write the success stories because they're there to measure the success of these children who do get the extra help.

And it's pretty incredible.

And as you might imagine, after COVID, the need is greater than ever.

There's a lot of talk about the lost learning.

So these volunteers are certainly there to help with that.

Right, that's amazing.

And help them succeed.

And they're volunteering their time, but sometimes, caregivers are put in situations where they have no choice, and that's a whole other part of what your program does and how they help.

Tell us more about that.

Absolutely.

We have a couple ways in which we help caregivers.

I'll speak to one and then I'm gonna ask Daiana to continue.

We have a Healthy Living department, which offers many evidence-based workshops, but the one for caregivers is called Powerful Tools for Caregivers.

It's an evidence-based six week workshop, which comes from Stanford University.

And it helps these caregivers learn to deal with their emotions, with the stress, help with depression, help with grief, really helps give them tools to navigate all the steps that are necessary for a caregiver.

So it's a great and very beneficial program for caregivers.

And then we do offer guidance for caregiver support and another opportunities through the helpline which I'll let Daiana speak to.

[Arlene] Sure, Daiana, talk about it.

Sure, so we do have several programs, state/federal funded that provide respite care for caregivers.

Someone that can go into the home, stay with the senior, while the caregiver can have time for themselves.

There's also adult daycare options.

Do they do, more than the respite, do they help with maybe showers, or how does it work?

Yes, it provides someone to help with bathing, dressing, personal care, assisting with the cleaning of the home and companionship.

How can volunteers help?

We actually have several volunteer opportunities.

If they qualify, we would love more foster grandparents to serve our children in the area.

But also, our Healthy Living department is very, very interested in volunteers to help lead the workshops and to help actually with paperwork and all the documentation that's necessary.

So they can be volunteers in the field, or they could actually be more or less clerical assistant volunteers with the organization.

Well, Trish, Daiana, you do so much to help people in need and an underserved population for sure.

Thank you so much for being here and sharing.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

We're happy to be here.

So for more than two decades, Jewish Community Services of South Florida has also been working to maintain the health and dignity of the area's older adult population.

Recently, the Your South Florida team spent some time at their Miami Beach location to see firsthand how their congregate meals program is helping clients access nutritious food, while fostering connections with others in the community.

Take a look.

Jewish Community Services serves everyone in the community.

We have programs for individuals from age zero to I think our oldest client is somewhere around 110 years old.

And we also oversee the 211 Miami, which is our 24/7 social service hotline for Miami-Dade County.

We have the senior services department, which is primarily focused on nutrition support for individuals aged 60 and over.

We have the congregate meals program.

We have two locations, one in Miami Beach, one in Aventura, where we provide a hot kosher meal.

All of our food support is kosher, and we provide activities and we provide opportunities for socialization.

We have yoga, we have tai chi, we have zumba, we have nutrition classes, we have guest speakers, we have art classes, we have community volunteers that come and do fabulous events for us.

We had a wonderful volunteer who made the most gorgeous floral arrangements with us for shvu'es in Mother's Day.

And it was just beautiful.

It was like a florist shop in here.

There are no income requirements for this program.

So whether you make less than a thousand dollars a month, which unfortunately, many of our clients do, or you make a million dollars a month, we believe that you deserve a hot meal and a place to feel like your home.

The exercise, the food, and the people are real nice here.

Actually, everything is real nice and it's all combined.

And it really helps the person, and especially somebody living alone.

The community and getting to know other people is helpful too.

Being alone again is not easy.

And getting to know different people and getting connected, and they become friends after a while, and they become almost family.

It's really amazing when you see the difference when somebody's engaged and creating, the whole thinking process, the whole mind process changes.

It's very therapeutic.

You see a whole new light that fills our members.

The energy is amazing.

Sometimes, when you sit back and do nothing, your thoughts is dark.

But when you mom somebody and you're doing something, it motivates you and you have bright in your thoughts.

Make you strong, make you strong.

I just love it.

I love coming here and being a mom to other peoples.

It helps me.

We are blessed to have such wonderful and dedicated volunteers.

We are a nonprofit, and we rely on community support.

We have a wonderful tech class that we offer.

Nick, who is our volunteer, he came to us and said, is this something you would be interested in?

And of course, after the pandemic, we saw the huge tech gap in older adults.

The seniors absolutely love him.

They show him their phones and their tablets, and he puts on wonderful presentations for us.

And we're just so grateful for that.

The things that I'm helping them with are things like to the youth, like they're considered so simple, but like it's really like life changing for seniors, just to learn how to do like simple things that we take for granted.

But for them, it's a huge thing.

He loves it, he enjoys it, he looks forward to coming.

He puts a lot into his classes, into creating classes and creating good, valuable content.

And also, to keep them engaged, keep them focused and keep them actively learning.

They once told Nick, "Nick, you made my day."

And that is, as a parent, and just as a volunteer, to feel like you contributed to making somebody happy and to make them happy for a day, it's an amazing feeling.

If this center was not here, many of these people would not have social interaction.

They would remain socially isolated.

They would not be entertained, they would not be educated.

They would not be doing the physical activities that support their ongoing health.

And the activities that I plan and prepare and coordinate with all of these teachers, they're really designed for their health.

My mother was living alone up until 89 last year, and she fell.

So I came here to help her out.

I started seeing all the beautiful food they were giving, and everybody's encouraging me to join and have food also.

So I'm 62, eating here also.

So she looks forward to coming here, being with the people, eating, bingo, any activities.

It's a hello, it's a welcome, it's a new face.

And it's actually keeping her alive.

And someplace for her, we live right across the street.

She crosses the street, comes here, and she's a different person here than she is at home.

Hey, tell everybody, how do you feel today?

How do you feel?

My hand?

Yeah, that's how she feels every day with her hands.

I think that we have so many people that are over 70, over 80 years old, is a validation of the success of having a senior meal site and activity center.

And it demonstrates, it really says, "Hey, this makes a difference in people's lives."

When people come in, they have people that are happy to see them.

And Jewish Community Services community is our middle name.

And we hope that when people come to us, they feel like they're home.

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.

We'll have more on all of the organizations featured on today's program, plus more resources on our social media at Your South FL.

While you're there, check out our latest Your Stories featuring two Miami residents both celebrating their 101st birthdays, thanks to the help of Easterseals, South Florida.

Happy birthday.

I'm Arlene Borenstein.

Thanks for watching.