Op-Ed: A heartfelt thank you to the City of Shoreline from the Senior Center

City of Shoreline Emergency Community Response Fund 

Grants $50,000 to Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center

On behalf of the Board of Directors, staff, volunteers and Shoreline seniors, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank-you to the City of Shoreline for financial assistance in the sum of $50,000 through the City of Shoreline Emergency Community Response Fund.

Your generosity will allow us to continue the Essential Services that we have been providing during this challenging time. Seniors are being firmly guided to stay at home and have adhered to this guidance. In doing so, they’ve encountered serious challenges which we quickly recognized and chose to address. 

We’ve been able to continue to provide daily hot nutritious meals delivered to their homes, provide a week’s worth of frozen meals at a time, provide a bag of groceries weekly, as well as assist with errands such as pharmaceutical pickups.

Confining oneself to their home when living alone not only develops feelings of isolation, but can foster fear and anxiety.

Your funding will allow us to continue our Mental Health Services in which seniors can telecommunicate with a mental health counselor, resourcing tips on coping with isolation. Our staff and a select group of skilled volunteers, make hundreds of telephone calls per week, just to say hello and see if individuals have any needs.

During a crisis such as COVID-19, added costs rise, overhead expenses remain the same and revenue halts for a 501(c)3 non-profit organization such as Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center. 

The City of Shoreline foresaw the needs of our community, quickly creating an emergency fund to ensure that critical services such as ours would have some resources to continue the much needed work that each of us performs.

We are very grateful for a council and city administration that has been very proactive in all phases of Emergency Management. We deeply appreciate your support of our work and the welfare of the seniors of Shoreline.

Sincerely,

Theresa LaCroix, Director
Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center