Seniors West of the Tetons

Nutrition: Seniors West of the Tetons offers congregate lunches five days a week in the Senior Community Center and delivers five meals a week to homebound seniors. Attendance at congregate lunches has averaged 40, with some lunches attracting more than 70 and special event lunches attracting over 100. Congregate lunches are open to non-seniors, and we have been pleased to see city workers, librarians, business people and families with children joining our seniors for lunch. SWOT also delivers meals to homebound seniors. Along with the meals, our delivery volunteers are able to check on the well-being of isolated seniors and provide a welcome social contact. Our home meals include a weekly bag of food basics provided by the Teton Valley Food Pantry. Both the congregate and the home-delivery programs are supported by donations and by the Eastern Idaho Community Action Project. Emerging from the pandemic closure in May 2022, we found our kitchen was inadequately staffed. We were fortunate to find a local chef who had long experience in both restaurant and institutional kitchens. He was able to adjust our kitchen operations to manage the higher-than-expected demand for congregate meals. Seniors came out of the pandemic hungry not only for food but companionship. We found ourselves serving four times as many people at our congregate lunches than we'd served before the pandemic. Our chef not only prepared excellent meals that kept bringing people back, he also instituted sound management practices for food ordering, menu development and food storage and handling. Most importantly, he and our other staff members devoted a great deal of time to training and supervising volunteers. We now have a well-trained, skilled cadre of volunteers (the equivalent of two full-time employees) working as cooks, servers, dishwashers, delivery drivers, and receptionists.

Diverse Programming: Recreational and social activities (bridge, mah jong, coffee klatsch, bingo) take place almost every day. A number of clubs and craft organizations hold meetings in the Senior Center as well. There are regular educational forums and entertainments, like the popular Pizza and a Movie series, that spill into the evening hours. Much of this development in programming is related to changes we have made in our facility. We have added high-quality A/V equipment and upgraded our dining service. These changes allow us to offer a wider variety of events and programs, which supports our conception of the Senior Community Center as a genuine community center rather than just a dining room. In January 2023, we remodeled an under-utilized lounge space in the dining room to become a meeting and work room. This allows services like our Tech Time and VITA tax preparation programs to operate while activities are going on in the main room and it provides a more congenial location for small group activities, like the Knitting Circle and the Death Café discussion group. This programming is facilitated by a full-time Operations and Programs Director, as well as by our Executive Director, who spends approximately 80% of her time on program management. In early 2023, we were awarded $32,000 in grants by local foundations to replace our aging bus. A "buy-a-seat" fundraising campaign raised another $20,000 and with additional funds drawn from our capital projects fund we were able to purchase a new 15-passenger van which arrived in March 2024. This van is much easier to drive and safer and it will allow us to greatly increase the number of field trips and excursions we offer.

Wellness: Eight hours of fitness programing, including Tai Chi (2 hours), Yoga (1 hour), and Fit and Fall Proof (4 hours) and drumming for exercise (1 hour) are offered each week. In addition, we host clinics for foot care, blood pressure monitoring, vaccinations, and health screenings. Medical professionals visit regularly to discuss issues like mental health, diabetes prevention and management, nutrition, and heart health. All wellness programs are offered free of charge, though some volunteer instructors accept small donations. Fit and Fall Proof is sponsored by the Idaho Department of Public Health, which offers training and material support to volunteer instructors recruited by Seniors West of the Tetons. Since all of these programs are offered by volunteers, the only cost to SWOT is an estimated facility fee for utilities, equipment, storage and other facility costs.

Advocacy, Communication and Outreach: Seniors West of the Tetons partners with our regional Area Agency on Aging to ensure services are available to keep seniors in their homes. We provide assistance with Medicare and other health insurance, federal and state taxes, access to health care, and general referrals to other services. This advocacy is channeled through our monthly print newsletter, which is mailed to over 500 seniors and community members, and regular online news updates. Our website and social media keep seniors informed about community happenings, senior center events and issues of concern to seniors, like Medicare enrollment and tax fraud. Much of this communication and outreach activity is supported by our administrative data system, My Senior Center, which allows us to make frequent and targeted contacts with seniors, to track of their participation in activities and events, and to link seniors directly with services and programs of interest. Our volunteers constitute another crucial component in our advocacy and communication strategy. Whether it is a home-delivered meal, fitness class or event, it is likely that a volunteer will be the point of contact between the organization and the client and will be the one to relay concerns to our staff members.

Hosting. In recent years, SWOT has been able to attract programming and services from other agencies, organizations and individuals through a policy of offering its facilities and programming assistance at a reduced rate to operations that engage or benefit seniors. A number of clubs and organizations (the Quilter's Guild, Alcoholics Anonymous, a children's choir, etc.) hold regular meetings in the Center. Other local non-profits often rent the facility for their conferences and events. These arrangements have proven mutually beneficial. The organization gets a highly functional space at an affordable rate and SWOT is able to offer in-house programming that would be otherwise beyond its means. SWOT's hosting extends to professional services for seniors. Teton Valley Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), a volunteer program funded by the IRS that offers free tax preparation and filing to low- and moderate-income taxpayers, and Senior Health Insurance Benefits Advisors (SHIBA), which offers assistance with Medicare enrollments and claims. Services like VITA and SHIBA often struggle to find appropriate facilities for their operations. The Senior Community Center with its recent enhancements meets their needs well. The large dining room with its AV equipment works well for presentations and it has proven to be a highly functional waiting area, where clients can fill out forms and organize documents prior to their interview. The workroom, which became operational just in time for the 2023 tax season, offers the privacy necessary for interviews and work sessions with clients and it offers secure internet access, which is essential to these services. An added benefit of locating these services in the Senior Community Center is the opportunity for drop-in contacts. The SHIBA program, for instance, schedules a monthly drop-in session during a Thursday lunch. Having these services available in a familiar, face-to-face setting is a tremendous benefit to Teton Valley seniors, especially considering how limited and expensive equivalent professional services are in our area. Finally, we have developed several event partnerships, like the recent adventure travel series organized by a local individual. Although not all of these are directly aimed at seniors, seniors often make up the bulk of the audience. In this partnership arrangement, SWOT provides the facility set-up and technical support and assists with advertising, outreach, and management and the event organizer focuses on the event itself. Again, SWOT is making use of the systems and resources it has built in the last five years to leverage programs and services that we could not offer on our own. This broad hosting program has come with a cost. Facility rentals for private parties were once a major source of revenue for SWOT. By discontinuing these private rentals and outfitting the Center to attract the kind of programming our seniors wanted and needed we sacrificed some revenue but greatly increased the scope of service to our community.