May 2006 Vol. 25. No. 5

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Ferndale: Transportation, meals on wheels, now a part of daily life

Older Americans Month champions choices for independence

Area Agency on Aging: Try riding the bus now that gas prices are so high

New CSL reps are from Del Norte County

McKinleyville seniors

Fortuna senior activities: Wellness Lecture Series at Senior Dining Room

Play ball! Humboldt Classics Senior Softball wants you

Ombudsman services - you can change a life

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Bridging the Gap in Ferndale, from left are Bob Clark, driver, John Gilliland and Mary Ann Bansen. The new van has provided 844 rides in its first year of operation. Photo by Barbara Clark

Mary Ann Bansen can't help but stand out in Ferndale these days. Not only has she been one of the many volunteers who has worked to serve the first and third Thursday senior lunches for the past ten years - the program has been going on for 25 years - she and eight other Ferndale residents have recently engineered two miracles in the Victorian town at the end of the road.

She has launched a transportation service for the rural senior population, encouraging many seniors to reduce driving trips, and begun a meals-on-wheels service that now provides hot meals five days a week for 25 to 30 home-bound seniors.

Chef Steve Sterback, who prepares all the meals, said, "I try to produce a restaurant quality meal for them. This can be the only meal they have, and Jack McDonald (the meal deliverer) can be the only person they see all day. We want them to feel special."

Bansen said that the home meal delivery idea began to take form in 2004 when she noticed that people would take food home from the twice-monthly senior lunch so that they wouldn't have to cook. Other people were telling her of seniors stocking up on cookies, and she herself noticed at the grocery store that seniors' purchases were mostly TV dinners and deli foods. "That's fine once in a while, but it's not healthy food for every day," Bansen said.

"I put together a working board and asked them to see if they were seeing the same things as I was seeing. They were," she said.

At the same time, more Ferndale seniors were getting into traffic accidents, and jokes were going around about who not to park close to, but people had no other ways to get around.

This was in late October, 2004. The group put together a questionnaire and sent out 750 of them, with a return of 356. "We were overwhelmed," she said. They tallied the questionnaires and waited until after January 2005 when they all agreed that they wanted to start the paperwork to start a 501(c)3 nonprofit agency.

The Ferndale Senior Resource Agency hung out its shingle March 1, 2005, after many elements in the Ferndale community came together in a flurry.

"The attitude in Ferndale has always been, we take care of our own," Bansen explained. "And I can't give enough credit to the Bertha Russ Lytel Foundation which supported us."

Redwood Memorial Hospital in Fortuna came on board and began cooking the meals for the fledgling group to deliver to its Ferndale seniors. Then in October 2005, the agency hired Chef Sterback who began cooking at the Fairgrounds' Belotti Hall and since January at the Ferndale Community Center.

The Lytel Foundation gave the new group its blessing and enabled them to buy a van.

Bansen explained, "I have a daughter who is a paraplegic, so I'm well versed in physical needs of people who are disabled. It gives me an edge up in how a transportation system needs to work." Her daughter, now 27, was injured in an accident in 1990. She is now a special ed teacher in Oregon and a first-time homebuyer.

In the first year of service, the agency has provided 844 rides to Ferndale seniors and 4,982 hot meals.

Bansen said, "I encourage other communities to come together to create what they need. Local foundations, with our financial donations, can endure and help focus our dollars in the community. Our group was able to do this because of the support of the Lytel Foundation and that of people willing to work on a common cause - to make it easier to live in Ferndale."

Bansen is board president of the Ferndale agency and she also took the helm as executive director of Fortuna Senior Services, Inc. "I'm a person who likes a challenge," she said.

Call 786-4141

Ferndale residents, sign up for meals or get a ride, call the Ferndale Senior Resource Agency, 786-4141. You'll buy a meal ticket or a ride ticket. For meals, call by noon Wednesdays. For rides, call 24 hours ahead of the time you need the ride.