Several New York City-based organizations attended a Committee on Aging hearing at City Hall on Wednesday to recommend improvements for handling the elderly community suffering from food insecurity.
Before the pandemic, the city had begun to see a decline in food insecurity, but by 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that people aged 65 and older that lived alone had become more food insecure.
Donna Coles, the assistant director of the Westbeth Older Adult Center at Greenwich House, an organization that addresses the social needs of New Yorkers, was the first to provide testimony at the hearing, and she requested increased funding for food for seniors.
“Every day, we hear from our participants that they are being forced to make impossible choices between covering their rent, paying for medication, and buying food,” said Coles.
Vik Bensen, the policy analyst from Citymeals on Wheels, a non-profit organization that delivers food to the elderly, expressed the importance of having the elderly qualify to have their meals delivered to their homes.
“There was a rush from the city to return to normal operations as quickly as possible, without considering ways to seriously adapt to our new COVID reality,” said Bensen during her testimony.
Bensen said her organization is calling on the city to conduct a survey to learn whether non-returnees to adult centers are meeting their food needs. She also recommended that there should be a formal process to allow adult center attendees to transition to being a member of the home-delivered meals program.
“We ask that the city seizes this opportunity to adapt these programs so they can continue to meet the needs of older adults who are living very different realities than when these programs were created decades ago,” Bensen said.
While the hearing’s purpose was to understand the food needs of the elderly in the city, its purpose was also to discover ways to combat the issue according to Crystal Hudson, the chair of the Aging Committee.
“I just want to make sure that those people are still being connected to resources and the services that they may need,” said Hudson.
The chair of the Subcommittee on Senior Centers and Food Insecurity, Darlene Mealy, was at the hearing, and she keenly listened to every suggestion that was given through testimonies and made notes while they were being offered.
One testimony from a representative from Live On NY, a non-profit organization that provides social services to New Yorkers, struck Mealy. The representative spoke about creating a pilot program that would allow older New Yorkers to get vouchers through their adult center that would allow them to buy meals at participating restaurants.
Mealy hopes to implement this program in her respective districts - Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights - and then she would work on spreading the program throughout the city.
Mealy said she is driven to assist elderly food insecure people because she feels that many people are not being catered to.
“I need more done for seniors, and it's not being done, in my perspective,” Mealy said. “One senior center in my district, they don’t have any food, and I can’t get an answer to why.”
Mealy believes that this same issue could be a problem in other districts, and she is working on creating a task force to ensure that no senior centers are experiencing this.
Council member Hudon’s Director of Policy, Andrew Wright, said that the committee members will begin examining budgets to advocate for funds from the city. Wright believes that legislation is likely to follow today’s hearing.