i am your host dr heidi weinhold and you are watching ask the nature of high we are out of the studios today visiting meals on wheels in peter's township it is a very impressive organization run by dedicated volunteers i would like to introduce you to rooster the director of the meals on wheels program in peter's township isn't i'm very impressed with the quality of the c g provides the menu planning in the cooking of our executive owens and she plans the menus for two weeks in advance and orders the food and prepares oversees the preparation of the meals she tries to use lots of fresh everything in the meal which i love as an eight metre pass to see all these fresh vegetables locally home cooked and it's such a wonderful service we really want to educate our viewers that this is available i don't know if you know but some of the vegetables this summer came from the bower hill elementary school garden that's wonderful and she farris brought them in in her arms with chard the beat the watermelon this fabulous what is the cost to have this service provided and what's included anyone who has trouble shopping or cooking and that's usually senior citizens can call us and ask for our help the meals are very reasonable the folks they do not pay the full cost of the meals are subsidized in other ways not by government but by local contributions and but for three dollars a day or three sixty a day for three dollars a day they can get a hot meal with all the things around it that includes a hot tray with as you saw today soul very steak mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables plus most cup of soup and crackers  salad dessert and milk ok that's a three dollar menu for three sixty they can also get in addition to all that a sandwich to use in a coffee for a lights up ok that's wonderful and i think you can afford to go to mcdonald's for that i mean people down the aisle that is i just want to stress to you that there is an age limit to this like you don't have to be a certain age quality don't i do want to stress very much that we are not a government program we receive no government funding state or federal we are a community service ok and we provide we order our own food make our own decisions about menus we are inspected we are inspected kitchen we follow all the regulations or the department of agriculture in the silty is absolutely beautiful it's located right above the fire department peters township and how long have you been here this is our second year this used to be a big quite empty room but as you may be able to tell in the background at coral and green now with beautiful paintings walk in coolers what you truly wonderful kitchen and that happened because we had a very generous foundation the center mark foundation help us renovate the facility we do rented from the township but the renovations were done by ok that's fifteen dollars charge a week for meals that  can't begin to cover your food costs in there how else do you supplement your additional costs we receive wonderful community donations from the civic organizations the rotary the lions club plus wonderful groups like the garden club the jonas garden club the lexington court garden club they are fabulous not only in bringing us crafts and favors for our clients but in giving us financial support as well that's wonderful plus individual donors contribute and our biggest donor is the center marc foundation which does a wonderful job of helping us everything is supported by by volunteers what kinds of donations are accepted here we do except through donations we we encourage people to bake for us cookies and bars and cakes are very welcome we do diabetic and regular cooking and it's a great thing to mention the holidays but i mean it will be baking and cooking to drop loosely based on extra dozen cookies for people think they can bring their leftovers yes and we can use some leftovers for example if you have leftover cookies or leftover fruit and things like that we really welcome those donations we cannot use  trays of things that have been opened already but if you have a whole tray of pasta or potatoes or something like that we welcome it just that it's been dug into we have to be very careful because of the food regulations that make sense i  acknowledge some of the other local businesses that they do donate to the meals on wheels to the mcmurry dairy bar is fabulous they give us their leftover baked goods and we can't thank them enough because our clients love the b us on the phone at the other end of the phone line had help with meals on wheels i wonder so we work for i just won't encourage also people in the holidays they're thinking about gifts or what was to you is really a nice gift is to purchase meals for somebody that is home bound saloon and i want people to kind of think a little bit outside of the box and well maybe there's a young mother at home that's getting ready to go through surgery or chemotherapy and it just being how homebound are having trouble getting out a lot of people want to help in avi's you know they may think i'm going to prepare dinner tonight for them make it a little easier but the same cost that it would be for them to make one meal you can spend that amount  the viewers how they how they can help but they do choose to volunteer what it's really looking for we need people to help in the kitchen know our cooking staff of three does all the hot meal preparation but we need volunteers to help with making the sandwiches  the dessert salad you could see today the tossed salad requires a lot of cutting and chopping so we always need help there ok and then we need help with the delivery which takes a very it takes about an hour and a half or a little longer the drivers come to our kitchen at ten thirty and take their meals out and they're usually back by twelve thirty or one and then there's so much activity going on at the center of this time you could see in the background it's about ten o'clock meals are being prepared and packaged and let's walk over and you can walk us through through the process based on the short season can you walk us through this  going on today with the daily operations sure we are at the point of assembling the bags which backs contain everything but the hot meal itself the hot tray in the soup so the station behind me we have a lot of our volunteers lined up they start with opening the bag and putting the salad in the milk the juice fruit or just search we are currently doing diabetic bag we do serve a diabetic meal to anyone who needs  the regular meal wonderful and you also had mentioned to me that you also comedy anybody with actually like special c d s or somebody was food allergies is that true yes we pay attention to people's allergies for example one person can have an orange juice so we always have a special cup of juice for you know if in case we're having orange juice we also do a number of chopped meals for people who have trouble either hundred eighty five rotary international committed to a goal of ending polio worldwide very soon now after him uniting over two billion children the goal will be achieved rotary humanity vegetables and there's some gravy in a big pot there too you're doing a diabetic meal down first diabetics get a slightly smaller amount of potato because of the carbohydrates but they get lots of vegetables we pri frozen vegetables or fresh vegetables fresh fruit for only because canned vegetables do have salt or cooked up a lot of the cooking from scratch and she never asked to anything we use a lot of other interesting things like herbs and spices and we she makes a habit of incorporating things that are donated for example one time large amount of shrimp were given to us so we had a very lovely chinese  here's a sample of one bag it has a lot of soup in the bottom and the meals are going on top of all the bags next to it belong to this group troop three and the drivers will come in and carry out the bags containers and take the hot meals to how do you keep track of which is diabetic and which which is the diabetic meals are in white bags and they are mar is shorter than some of the other now helps us and many other organizations with their computer near and i'm sure it's expensive just to stay organized just to be able to plan out the meals and the people and where you deliver s long does it take you to i mean when do they start cooking these meals when they start packaging how much time does a steak takes quite a long time are our sushi chef comes in and his assistant come in at  and six thirty lisa arrives at six thirty and so they've been working quite a while when the rest of the volunteers come in and how long does it take or how many volunteers are there to deliver the mail flagrant once they pick the meals up  they go out on the delivery time approximately how i want is that it takes well we have about we have eight groups plus some other special people we deliver individually to so each group has either one person or two people who drive it so anywhere for probably about ten to fifteen people and just sixteen people drive any one day that's in addition to the ten people who help in the kitchen that day so we have twenty five people involved every day and these are all volunteers were volunteers driving and helping you which one thing people don't realize is ortho or name is meals on wheels of peter's township we deliver break water bottles the forms of course more to ship than you think charge donations provide immediate effect relief for those who need it without the shipping cost if we all do our part together we can provide help across the world to learn more check out and see id i don't borg america or because i want to change people's lives a national endowment for financial education a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people just like you get smart about their money log on to smart about money dot org today and start taking control of your financial life about we try to do all of our milk from scratch we don't do a lot of pre made stuff we try to use fresh vegetables and fruits if that's not available then we do frozen we don't do any susan thank you so much for your time and thank you to all the wonderful volunteers for for providing this valuable service for the community until next time out and what's the phone number let's let's leave the let's leave them with a phone number again  nine six nine one thousand that's that's the number you can call if you want to sign up for meals you want to donate the money to give a gift thank you