CHEER Community Champions Week Begins March 16
Salisbury, Md. – March 16 marks the beginning of CHEER Inc.’s Community Champions Week, a campaign that invites local and state officials to come together and deliver meals to seniors as part of its “March for Meals” campaign.
The March for Meals campaign is part of a nationwide month-long advocacy and awareness campaign commemorating the day when a national nutrition program for seniors was added to the Older Americans Act in 1972. Community Champions Week is an effort to boost local engagement with seniors and raise awareness for CHEER’s work. For CHEER’s COO, Tom Reardon, the campaign is about inspiring others to engage in their local community. For CHEER Chief Operating Officer Tom Reardon, the campaign is about inspiring others to engage in their local community.
“Hopefully they not only experience it, but they advocate for those people as well to help ensure that they get fed and they get the nutrition that they need,” he said.
On Monday morning, newly-elected Sussex County Councilwoman Jane Gruenebaum joined CHEER to deliver meals seniors at three different homes in the community.
“It was heartening,” she said. “I mean, these are our neighbors who, for any number of reasons, can’t get out and need help and CHEER delivers food to them.”
Gruenebaum said CHEER enables vulnerable seniors to “age in place,” which helps strengthen their bond to their neighborhoods and communities.
“And the only way a lot of people can do that is through the help that the CHEER Center and other groups provide,” she said. “So, for me as a council member, it’s great to get out into the community to see where the need is, to see how these needs are being met and just to be aware of what we at the county level can do to be helpful.”
Gruenebaum also mentioned how seniors sometimes need help caring for themselves and their pets. CHEER Community Engagement Director confirmed that CHEER will also be delivering pet food to those in need so that seniors do not need to eat less of their own food to feed their pets.
According to CHEER, last year the campaign enabled them to deliver a quarter of a million meals to seniors throughout the county. However, for Reardon, the benefit of delivering food to seniors goes beyond the meals themselves.
“There’s the volunteer who stops in and just makes sure that they’re doing okay, that they can be a friendly face,” he said. “You know, we have a serious social isolation problem and for a lot of these people who received the meals, this will be the only other human being they speak to in that day. Sometimes, sadly, even in that week.”
Both Reardon and Gruenebaum expressed gratitude to the Sussex County residents who volunteer their time, energy and money, whom without that none of the work CHEER does would be possible.
“They do it all out of out of their own resources and out of the goodness of their own hearts” he said. “It’s a heavy lift sometimes, especially when some of our recipients are a good ways out from one of the centers. But, I mean, just because it’s a distance doesn’t mean it’s any less important.”
Gruenebaum said that she hopes the kind of work CHEER and other nonprofit organizations do to help more vulnerable populations of Sussex County inspire others to do the same, especially in light of extreme weather able to cause power outages.
“I would hope that people think more about being part of their community, because we are ‘all in this together,'” she said.
Community Champions Week will run through Thursday.
