Community Based Senior Centers and Services: Keeping Older Adults in their Homes
By State Senator Liz Krueger

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the importance of ensuring seniors are able to remain in the communities in which they have lived their lives. Achieving this goal requires that older adults can receive a range of services, from supportive housing and home care to meals programs and access to income support programs. But for many seniors, the backbone of their community support system is the senior center, one which provide meals, recreational opportunities, and a sense of community. And senior centers provide much more - they are often the link between seniors and the many services that help them lead meaningful lives in their communities. They also can be troubleshooters for seniors, helping them identify and avert crises that older adults may be facing.

Unfortunately senior centers are often forced to lead a tenuous existence. Their budgets are extremely dependent on state and city government support, funding streams often threatened in times of fiscal retrenchment. Just two years ago, many senior centers were faced with the prospect of closing their doors due to city budget cuts. Fortunately, an outpouring of community opposition saved these centers from elimination. But the pressures on centers remain, and every year they face uncertainty as to whether they will have to absorb severe budget cuts.

There are other useful models for senior support services in the community as well. One Stop Senior Services is an excellent alternative example. For more than twenty years, it has focused its efforts on helping seniors with issues of access to benefits, entitlements and other government services. By providing a single location where seniors can get assistance on all kinds of benefits issues, it is a critical part of the support network that allows seniors to remain in the community.

In recent years, both traditional senior centers and service centers such as One Stop have broadened the kinds of services they provide. One Stop has expanded their services to include fitness programs. Many senior centers, such as Lenox Hill Senior Center in my district, now offer significant assistance with benefits and housing issues, in addition to the more traditional meals programs. This evolution is extremely useful, because it increases the ability of seniors to have their multiple needs met at a single location, which in turn makes it easier for them to remain in the community.

My office recently completed a senior needs assessment project that identified a number of issues of concern to seniors. One shared theme among the seniors to whom we spoke was the importance of senior centers as a source of companionship, and an opportunity for networking and the exchange of information. Seniors were concerned about the impact of funding decisions on their centers, and they stressed the need for centers to be open regularly with expanded hours.

One Stop Senior Services

Over 20 years ago, a group of local activists, organizations and agencies came together to launch West Side One Stop for Coordinated Senior Services, now called One Stop Senior Services. Their goal: to provide seniors with a single location to apply for all benefits and entitlements and to enable seniors to continue living safely and independently in their own community.

For over 20 years, One Stop has served tens of thousands of the neediest elderly New Yorkers on the Upper West Side.

Representatives of different government agencies are on site and work with One Stop staff on issues including evictions, food stamps, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.

Project Find

More than 50,000 senior citizens responded to questionnaires,  the first major effort in the United States to study the lives of low-income older adults, identify their greatest needs, and investigate the resources available to them.

In New York City, thousands of seniors were identified as living in unsafe conditions, isolated, ill, hungry and often suffering from malnutrition. In 1969, when the demonstration project ended, a group of dedicated, grassroots community activists joined Project FIND leaders and founded and incorporated FIND Aid for the Aged, Inc. Today, Project FIND in New York City is the only one of the original 13 demonstration programs that survives.

Project Find provides housing, meals and a variety of activities to older adults on Manhattan's Upper West Side.