Director’s news for July

The Senior Center is in the process of slowly opening our programs again. Please be reassured that we have planned this re-opening with your safety and health in mind. We have worked with the local Board of Health for guidance and received help from a local nursing student from Southern New Hampshire University, Lindsey Bernard, to assist us with this process. Lindsey completed a comprehensive health education module which will assist the Senior Center on best practices with the re-opening of the Center. We wish to thank Lindsey for her efforts and appreciate her hard work.

We know that older adults are more vulnerable to COVID-19 (8 out of 10 COVID-19 deaths reported have been in people 65 years and older).  With more and more seniors being vaccinated and the positive COVID cases decreasing, we are now in a better position to scale up our programs even more.  Our Senior Center is a great place to fulfill your physical, emotional, nutritional, and social needs. However, due to our space limitations of the Center and the inability to adequately socially distance our participants, we will be going thru various stages on scaling up our Center’s programs and activities. 

Last month, we opened up our activity programs with outdoor programs with a limited number in attendance. Due to the hot weather anticipated for the month of July, we will move our outdoor programs indoors with a continued limit of participants and continue to maintain social distancing. This will allow our seniors to be in a more comfortable environment with the a/c and continue to maintain safe practices. In addition, we are so excited to announce live Yoga and Zumba classes to be held again. The 8-week classes will be held at our satellite site at McCloskey School, located at 62 Capron Street, effective July 22.  Our Yoga instructor is Dr. David Tapscott, a certified yoga instructor and our Zumba instructor continues to be Amy Smith. We appreciate our instructor’s willingness to help us scale up our programs again. Please be sure to sign up early as space will be limited. See details inside our newsletter.

The Nutrition Program has been extremely innovative during the pandemic. We went from serving a congregate lunch program five days a week into a two day/two meal home delivery system as well as a twice a month curbside lunch. The home delivery program has been very successful, but the senior center will not be able to sustain this delivery system, as well as scaling up the congregate meal setting which we previously had. We anticipate slowly discontinuing the home delivery meals by the end of the summer. For the month of July, in addition to the home delivered meals and curbside lunches, we are excited to announce the opening of the congregate lunch on Mondays only starting July 12. Please RSVP 48-72 hours ahead to reserve your seat. Transportation will be available to the center on Mondays. Again, we are slowly scaling up operations and we appreciate your patience while we navigate through this process. We miss you all and are hopeful that we will be back to “normal” soon.

Our SHINE representative Pat Nectow will be returning on the third Tuesday of each month by appointment only, for those that need assistance with health insurance information. Please call the center for more info. We are excited to welcome Pat back. Dr. B (our foot doctor) will be returning back on July 29 at 8:30 a.m. Please call to book your appointment. Our Transportation Program continues to provide rides to medical appointments as well as for shopping, pharmacy and banking needs. Please call Donna to book your ride.

Lisa Bernard, Director