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June 3, 2004
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June 3, 2004 |
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Friends Care sports new ride
With the new custom-built, air-conditioned, soft-cushioned mini-bus now running at Friends Care Community, four passengers in wheelchairs and five ambulatory passengers can ride in style to the mall, the theater or anywhere else they want to go and cannot drive to themselves. But the biggest advantage to the flexible design of the new bus is that it can also transport up to 14 Yellow Springs seniors through a ride share program with the Yellow Springs Senior Center. The bus was purchased with the help of a 2002 challenge grant from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation, which sought to maximize the use of the transportation resources of Friends Care and the Senior Center to better serve all local senior citizens. The $30,000 grant was funded by the Constance Golden and Lester W. Sontag endowment, established partly to support local transportation services for the elderly. The Senior Center used $20,000 from the grant last year to purchase a three-passenger Toyota sedan for its ride share program. FCC used the other $10,000 for a down payment on the new bus, which cost a total of $60,000, FCC Director Jeff Singleton said last week. The two new vehicles, coupled with two older vans the organizations share, he said, will serve the transportation needs for seniors in town: local trips to the doctor, the drugstore and the grocery store, as well as getting out for recreational activities. “We want our residents to have the same opportunities as others living in the community,” Singleton said. Friends Care takes its nursing home and assisted living residents out to lunch once a week, to Cincinnati Reds games once a season and to concerts in Dayton and Springfield. Activities coordinators wanted to offer more out-of-town excursions, Singleton said, but the available vehicles did not always accommodate the number and combinations of handicapped and wheelchair-bound residents who wanted to go. The Senior Center also wanted to offer local residents more opportunities to attend social events out of town, but its vehicles were often tied up serving the daily needs of 40 regular passengers who travel to three different counties, Rodney Bean, director of the Senior Center, said. The center did take one trip to the Newport Aquarium in Cincinnati last year with four different cars, but it was a logistical challenge and did not give participants a chance to talk to each other on the long ride, he said. “We thought if we had a bus the party would start as soon as we left town,” Bean said. “It would really expand what we were able to do.” With the new bus available between the two agencies for day trips, Bean plans to organize shopping trips to the mall, visits to Cox Arboretum, trips to Cliff Park in Springfield for outdoor performances and perhaps another trip to the aquarium or another museum in Cincinnati. The Senior Center purchased its car under budget, giving the center $2,000 to spend on a new computer and central dispatch system to coordinate schedules for the vehicles and passengers from both the Senior Center and the FCC. Bean’s brother Hadley, who lives in Alabama, has volunteered over 40 hours to design and build a database network, which should be up and running by late fall, Bean said. Wanda Johnson will perform the vital role of dispatch coordinator from the Senior Center. Both FCC residents and Senior Center members still have needs that can’t be met by the new bus. Any field trip from the nursing home, especially for residents with major disabilities, requires adequate staffing, a challenge independent of the new vehicle, Singleton said. Some Senior Center members who ride in wheelchairs also need a means of regular transportation in town that a large bus is not best suited for, Bean said. Though the bus doesn’t solve every transportation need in Yellow Springs, it does provide a wider range of possibilities for ride sharing among the elderly. Securing the vehicles was the hard part, Singleton said; now it’s just a matter of using them efficiently between agencies to get the maximum benefit for villagers.
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