HOULTON, Maine — With COVID-19 confining many seniors to their homes, the local Meals on Wheels program has been busier than ever in delivering food to their doorsteps. But when one of the volunteer drivers found himself unable to deliver on Tuesday, the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office stepped up.
“We reached out to the sheriff’s office and Sheriff [Shawn] Gillen immediately responded,” said Erin Casey, the nutrition manager for the Aroostook Agency on Aging, which runs the meals on wheels program. “They said ‘Yes, we’ll be there, what time, just tell us what to do.’”
Gillen and three deputies met with Casey at 8 a.m. at the Catholic Charities warehouse in Caribou, where she gave them bags of food and a list of consumers to serve — a total of 14 people living in the outskirts of the Caribou area.
“They’ve had a huge increase in meals and they desperately needed some help, so we decided to give them a hand,” Gillen said. “Which is something we all should be doing anyway. And we will continue to do that for them as long as we possibly can.”
Casey says that the need for volunteers to do deliveries for seniors who rely on the meal service is crucial, especially during this time.
“Right now we are finding volunteers are everything, and these kinds of community connections and partnerships really go a long way for us,” she said.
“I think it’s important that anyone who is able needs to be reaching out to the agency to try and get those services,” Gillen said.
In addition to helping with the Meals on Wheels program, the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office also assists seniors with the Friendly Caller Program, which does daily phone calls to seniors living alone to check in with them and their health, and sends someone to them if the need arises.
