Atlanta seniors need their safety net

By Jaclyn Barbarow and Jeffrey M. Smythe


When an older woman we’ll call Mrs. Bird (not her real name) retired from her position in food service at Fort McPherson, she received a letter of gratitude from Gen. Colin Powell, to whom she had served lunch many times. Mrs. Brownstone, who was a schoolteacher for decades before retiring, can regale you for hours with tales of her youth.

Both raised families while working low-paying jobs. Though each has become slow-moving with age, they get up each day and spend time with their peers: Mrs. Bird visits with her neighbors while she awaits her Meals On Wheels Atlanta delivery driver; Mrs. Brownstone (not her real name) attends the Vivian T. Minor Adult Day Care Center where social and physical support help to delay the effects of Alzheimer’s.

Atlanta’s Office of Grants Management has recommended a 100 percent cut in funding for the programs that allow these women to thrive and remain in their own homes as they age. For many years, Atlanta’s community development block grants have supported these programs, following our favorite saying: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

By empowering older adults to remain safe, happy and healthy in their homes, the city helped reduce the risk that seniors or their families would end up homeless or institutionalized. This year, funding is being redirected away from seniors, even as Atlanta’s older adults are being hit hard by the economy.

These women have been good stewards to our community and good stewards of our resources. They spent their young lives building this city and building their homes. They supported a city that nearly tripled in population while supporting their children and grandchildren. They have done everything we asked of them. Now it is our turn to support them. Now is not the time to turn our backs.

In my years delivering meals, I have walked up pathways to two-room homes holding eight people, wondering how the rundown shack was still considered habitable.

I have delivered to a condemned apartment building where half a roof had fallen in. A few seniors were still living there because they had nowhere else to go.

When I had trouble finding the building, I called the woman whose meal I was delivering. “You probably just passed it by,” she said. “It doesn’t look like anyone could live here, but we do.”

These are the older adults supported by the not-for-profit Senior Citizen Services of Metropolitan Atlanta. These are the people for whom we are a safety net, providing vital resources for those in the greatest need.

The city’s grant of nearly $30,000 for Meals On Wheels Atlanta provides nutritious, daily, home-delivered meals to 54 individual seniors — a total of 9,300 meals a year. Another grant in the same amount for adult day care enables independence for 28 older adults, 20 of whom are able to pay on a sliding scale thanks to the city’s financial aid.

Without this assistance, the added cost of elder care could cripple their families’ threadbare finances and destabilize their children’s ability to maintain steady employment.

Mrs. Bird and Mrs. Brownstone would never let this happen to us. How are we going to tell them that the city of Atlanta is turning its back on them now, just when they need us most?

Jaclyn Barbarow is grants and gifts manager for Senior Citizen Services of Metropolitan Atlanta Inc. Jeffrey M. Smythe is the organization’s executive director.