Berkshire County — Virgil Stucker retired a few years ago from executive positions he held in community foundations and healthcare organizations across the country, ultimately landing with his wife in Monterey. These days, with a few extra hours on his hands, the 72-year-old volunteers with Elder Services, becoming a member of its Board of Directors to “try to make a difference.”
“As I looked at the needs of elders in the community, I thought, ‘This is my tribe,’” Stucker said. “There are a lot of us, and I think life for elders in Berkshire County may become more and more challenging—there’s a shortage of home healthcare workers, adequate medical care, and paying for that.” He chose to be a part of a process that is trying to address those challenges.
On Monday, Stucker was alerted to a White House memo, an executive order, that could have jeopardized the daily lives of the beneficiaries of the organization by way of a “pause” in federal grants and loans, with the group relying heavily on government monies. “The freeze worried me for the members of our community that rely on this essential service for their daily nutrition,” Stucker said. “Thankfully, the freeze was rescinded for now.” The Trump administration retracted that executive order in a two-sentence email on January 29.
According to Stucker, seniors are the fastest growing segment of the Berkshire County population. “We generally think of the Berkshires as an idyllic place for this tribe of us called ‘elders,’ and it is,” he said. “There’s so many enriching, intellectually stimulating, culturally wonderful experiences to have and the beauty of nature—what else could you want? But then you realize that there are a lot of elders in our community who are hurting. There are folks our age who need support.”
Elder Services, a nonprofit organization, offers a vast array of federal and state services to all 32 cities and towns in Berkshire County, including its largest federal program, Meals on Wheels, that ensures elderly residents have a hot meal, Executive Director Christopher McLaughlin explained. The group is one of only three organizations in the Commonwealth’s 27 such groups that maintain its own kitchen, he said of the Lanesborough facility. On any given day, Elder Services serves between 900 and 975 meals, five days a week, and about 80 percent of those meals are delivered to seniors’ homes, with the remainder served at one of 16 dining sites throughout Berkshire County. In a typical year, the organization is responsible for about 250,000 meals.
Other programs are hosted by Elder Services and funded through federal monies, including a long-term care ombudsman program to coordinate volunteers to advocate for nursing home residents; a family caregiver program to assist those caring for loved ones; a counseling program for those with housing issues; and agency information specialists. Elder Services also maintains federal subgrants distributed to seven different organizations that provide services to seniors, including the Berkshire Center for Justice and Community Legal Aid.
These programs are exclusively federally funded with the small exception of a few private donations that trickle in from time to time, McLaughlin said.
Upon hearing of the January 27 executive order, McLaughlin’s first reaction was one of shock. “Any kind of a cut, any kind of delay in payments would be disastrous,” he said. However, since the implementation of the measure was stayed and later rescinded, the organization’s access to payments wasn’t affected, McLaughlin said. “Obviously anything like that causes anxiety and concern, but the reality was that it wasn’t in effect long enough for us to truly learn what the impact might have been,” he said.
But there is another downside to a potential federal-funding halt. For many of McLaughlin’s clients, the Meals on Wheels delivery is “their primary meal of the day.” “At least as important as that is the human interaction they receive when they interact with their driver,” he said. “The drivers and their clients form these really nice bonds. You come to realize that, very often, when the driver is delivering the meal, that might be the only time during that day that the client is seeing another human being.”
At that time, the driver checks on the client’s wellbeing, McLauglin said, serving “a very needed social function” that would constitute a loss in addition to the program’s nutritional component “if all of a sudden there was a proclamation that there’s no more funding for Meals on Wheels.”
Currently, the organization’s coffers may have enough funds to last between one and three months, “in the best-case scenario,” should federal monies lapse, McLaughlin said, adding that finding private sources to replace the public funds needed to operate would be difficult.
Given that Elder Services has federal and state designations making it the area’s exclusive provider of some of its services, McLaughlin said a funding curtailment “would have significant and wide-reaching consequences for people who really rely on us for those kinds of services so they can continue living independently.” “For most people, living independently means continuing to live in their own homes,” he said.
For now, McLaughlin’s team is “resting easier than we were when we thought there was a suspension [of funding] in place.” “It’s wonderful news that it went away,” he said. “Obviously, the fear is that it could return. I think as a senior team, we’re going to have to evaluate what we think the future means to us.”