City-led program will rely on volunteers to organize and coordinate activities, utilizing one main calendar
While campaigning for Medical Lake mayor last year, Shirley Maike found that one of the things that kept coming up at forums was developing programs for senior citizens and how to connect them with those activities.
That interaction revealed Medical Lake has a solid Parks and Recreation program, especially for kids.
“I said to (City Administrator) Doug (Ross), what do we have for seniors, an official senior services program?” Maike said.
As the two went through a list of different activities such as senior lunch and Feed Medical Lake, the problem was it is “Not all captured somewhere,” Maike said. “There isn’t an umbrella of someone saying let’s make sure everyone knows what’s available.”
That “umbrella” turned out to be City Council candidate Don Kennedy and his wife Vickie who were asked to “ramrod” it, Kennedy said. “It’s one of those things, if you want something done you pick a busy person to do it.”
“Her objective is to make sure there are senior events that happen virtually every day of the week,” Kennedy said.
The need is to collect events and funnel them into a main calendar so people can find out what is going on. A number of senior events that can happen, but there is no coordination.
The main goal is to make sure there are events every day to get people out of their houses, Kennedy said. “You don’t want to be in those situations where you have to be in the right place at the right time to know what’s going on,” he added.
City Hall will act as a clearing house by posting what is available on its website and in the utility bill, the mayor said. The goal is to get the information out to as many people as possible.
“There is so much word-of-mouth, somebody knows somebody that ‘Hey, this is going to happen’; if we can let a small group of people know,’” Maike said.
Social media was brought up, but Kennedy warned, “I don’t know if the rest of the seniors in Medical Lake are like me, but I do have a Facebook account; I couldn’t tell you what year it was I last logged in.”
The city wants to hear back from seniors as to what they want to see, how it should be made available and how can they help.
They would connect with people who do different activities, perhaps pinochle on a given night, accompanied by board games or others.
“They can say, ‘Hey, I’d really like to go to that,’” Maike said. “Or, hey, I’d like to go to that, or some friend can say, ‘I’d like to take Marie to that because she hasn’t been out of the house in a while, and I know she loves Scrabble.’”
One of Maike’s ideas is to possibly have a movie shown after the monthly Feed Medical Lake functions. Or maybe there might be music for listening.
Running an event is not something that’s going to overwhelm anybody, she said.
Kennedy said that he hopes it is his wife who is the key point of contact. From there as the group fine tunes itself, the goal is to have a point of contact — a trip/event leader — to guide the individual activities.
MORE INFO
Want to help organize senior citizen events for Medical Lake? Contact Vickie or Don Kennedy via email (Kraton@msn.com) of phone (509) 220-8102 or (509) 299-9193.
Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.
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