HANSON – Council on Aging Director Mary Collins updated the Select Board on Tuesday, Feb. 25 by “introducing” them to some elder neighbors facing challenges board members may never had imagined being issues in their little town.
“Quite frankly, it’s good for you to hear once a year, some of the figures from the Senior Center,” she said. But many in the public have attitudes that can hinder the work the centers do, according to Collins, who listed some of the public’s reaction to the phrase “senior center:”
• “You’ll never find me in a senior center;”
• “I’m too young to go to a senior center;”
• “They don’t have anything that interests me.”
But when a crisis happens, regarding their health, their spouse’s health, possibly that of their parents or a friend, they turn to the senior center.
“It could be a change in their financial situation, getting behind in payments, or their refusal to burden their children with such worries,” she said. “Where do they go?”
When home modifications are needed for parents to move in, but adult children can’t afford to make those modifications, where can they turn? Problems in finding affordable housing – possibly from the loss of a spouse leaves a person fearful.
“They have a place to turn,” Collins said.
Senior centers help when physical limitations make preparing healthy meals too difficult, or the mailbox is overflowing with material from different healthcare providers as they turn 65 and it gets confusing. Where do these people turn?
“They turn to the senior center,” she said. “They turn to the Hanson Senior Center. Whether it’s through a call to the Town Hall asking for help; whether it’s directly to us, we seem to foster those kind of calls on almost a daily basis.”
Select Board members expressed their appreciation for the work Collins and her staff provide.
“You know we’re huge fans of the work that you do every day all day,” Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “You’re an amazing person and we’re lucky to have you. What can we do to help you?”
She said that the board does not want to see Collins or her staff get burned out, so, whether she need more part-time people, or whatever else she needed, FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
“If you have the conversation, it might not happen today, but we can try to build it into things and get you that additional support so you can continue to do what you’re doing and you might even be able to do more,” she said.
“Two services that are vastly underfunded [in Hanson] are veterans’ services and the Council on Aging, said Board member Joe Weeks. “That demographic is only rising, and veterans have always been underserviced. If you don’t ask, we can’t help.”
According to figures Collins obtained from the Hanson Town Clerk’s office 4,115 residents are over age 55. If the population is 11,000 that figure represents more than 37 percent of the population. At 10,000 residents it would be 41 percent of the population. Many senior centers want to keep up with the changing interests of people, such as technology and educational programs.
Weeks said Town Meeting is the place where the town decides where its money goes, and if departments don’t know to ask for it there, he doesn’t think it’s possible to get it.
Board member Ed Heal also thanked Collins for her hard work, adding he thinks he’s taken Collins and her department for granted because they are able to do so much.
“I know you need more help, but what you do is unbelievable – way beyond what one person should be doing,” he said.
“That is really difficult to do at the Hanson Senior Center because I have a part-time administrative assistant … a part-time outreach person … I have a van driver and myself,” she said. In 2024, the Hanson Senior Center delivered more than 4,500 meals to people, congregate hot meals were served to more than 1,000 and more than 6,800 people got transportation to the center and/or medical appointments.
Referral paperwork for SNAP and housing assistance paperwork was provided by Collins personally for well over 65 people last year, and the most time-consuming assistance provided by senior center staff and volunteers was for Medicare enrollment was proved to 398 individuals – 170 of them during the annual open enrollment period from mid-October to Dec. 7. That assistance saved those clients more than $91,000.
The weekly programs for community connections and entertainment are also very popular. A healthy aging program offered by Old Colony Elder Services on memory boosting last year was very well attended and a new education program offered this beginning in March, will be a six-week program on chronic illness and disease management.
Perhaps most needed was the Modular unit they recently obtained through a $300,000 grant, which permitted the much-needed Leah’s Club supportive day program.
“It was our one and only chance,” Collins said of the grant. “We’re not like the library – we don’t get that funding.”
The grant was designed for elder services organizations that had lost, or were thinking of starting, a supportive day program.
“We had a supportive day program for 27 years when COVID hit,” she said. “As a result of COVID and people having to not work during that period, we lost the program. …[Leah’s Club] is a group which was established to fill an unmet need that the loss of the supportive day program during COVID left in it’s wake.”
Collins and her staff were “very strongly aware” of people in the community with forms of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease whose families and spouses were trying to care for them and keep them safe.
“We started Leah’s Club simply because of this need,” she said, noting that one day supportive day Director Leah Guercio, 96, came to Collins and said they had to fill that void in services. Guercio and her young assistant are paid out of a formula grant.
“We have wonderful volunteers,” she said of Leah’s Club, which meets twice a week from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. “People are engaged, they feel like a human being again and gives their families a little bit of respite that they need.
Henry Monet’s Wednesday Dancing with Henry program is very popular with Leah’s Club and sends them out the door to the old song, “You’re My Best Friend.”
The grant helped address a big challenge in returning Leah’s Club, as well – a lack of space.
“People came out of the woodwork for Leah’s Club,” she said. “People can’t afford assisted living housing.”
Once the modular building was obtained, the senior center asked clients’ families if there was any interest in bringing it back up to five days a week. The answer was a resounding, “Yes,” even if they have to pay for it. That full-time service will return in May.
“It’s an answer for a lot of families,” she said.
Collins thanked public safety partners from the Hanson Fire and Police departments that keep seniors safe and go the extra mile by teaching seniors a CPR class, and the Hanson Food Pantry, which has set up a little free “store” in the center lobby for clients to help stretch their food benefits and may be shy about going to the main food pantry.
She also thanked the Friends of the Hanson Senior Center as well as Hanson Community Christmas for always caring for seniors in the community,