Receive Report on the Mastick Senior Center 2014 Annual Report.  (Recreation and Parks Department 5195)
Six A receiver report on the Mastic Senior Center 2014 Annual Report. To present this evening. We told you we'd be back. Good evening, Madam Mayor. And City Council and staff. I'm Jackie Kraus, recreation manager with the Alameda Recreation and Parks Department. And I'm Ron Lemos and my second term as president of the Master. Domestic Senior Center opened its doors on July 1980. So we're going into our 35th year. It's a former elementary school. And. There's 30,000 square feet of fun. At Mastic. The property also has two apartments that occupy the former principal's office. So we have a studio and a two bedroom apartment. And there's also a double bungalow behind us, which is used as a preschool. I'm supposed to read the mission. Talking to the microphone, because then we'll all be able to hear you. Think it's supposed to speak to the mission. But before I do that, I want to simply thank most of you. Can you hear me all right? That if you stand directly in front of it. Sorry. Sounds really loud from my point of view. I want to thank all of you that came to our volunteer recognition dinner a couple of weeks, lunch a couple of weeks ago. It was a very special event. More than 280 volunteers were recognized for thousands of hours, as you'll be hearing. But it was particularly warming to have them new members, particularly new members and a couple of the older members of council there. So thank you for doing that. The mission of the Mastic Senior Center is to provide a well-rounded education, social and recreation program for adults 50 years of age and older. So 50 years of age and older. Remember our vision statement is that the mastic? I see the look on your face. Mastic Senior Center's vision is to offer a variety of quality programs and services in the areas of health, education and recreation to our seniors and to the community. Bring a microphone, Jacqui. You've got and you've got a song. Here we go. Yeah. Okay. So don't need it by the end of the presentation. So senior served during in 2014, 148,520 visits to the senior center. So those are seniors, but there are also family, friends, neighbors, anybody seeking services to support somebody that they love or care about during that time. Our membership was 3401. As of April, the end of April this year, our membership is at 3434. So the the center is growing. The membership grows. During 2014, we've served 630 folks in tech service. We provided transit or travel and trip opportunities for 1012 people. So each month we do. A monthly trip where. Folks can travel outside of Alameda, but we also do extended travel and we partner with collect tours. And so some of those trips for 2014 included a trip to the Tournament of Roses Parade, the French Riviera and New York City Islands of New England and Portugal. And then we do fundraising at the senior center and. And back in 1980. I meant to say earlier that the city realized that they could not solely support Mastic Senior Center, and the senior community realized that they couldn't solely support Mastic Senior Center. So we are a very wonderful partnership. So we do fundraising through the Mastic Senior Center Advisory Board. So 6173 residents 18 years of age and older came out to play bingo, whereas 12,875 sales happened in the thrift shop. So if you think that there was many lookie loos, every time you go to a store, you don't always make a purchase. It's quite vibrant. At our location. Our demographics are really quite interesting. About 41% of the number of members that Jackie just mentioned are of the boomer generation from 50 to 69, which means if your math is good, that close to 50% or 49% of our members are between the ages of 70 and 80 plus. And believe me, if you come over and spend any part of a morning or an afternoon over there, you will see very active seniors. And if you've never seen pickleball played, come over. So knowing that we were in the midst of a baby boom, we continually reevaluate our program to try to keep everybody happy, if possible and when possible, so that we are serving the 72, 80 plus crowd, but also trying new activities to bring in the 50 plus crowd. So Support Services Mastic Senior Center. The city of Alameda receives a grant through the area agency on Aging of around $25,000 per year. And we also bring awareness to the programs that the county supports. So some of those are highlighted, one being the health insurance counseling program. So four times a. Month we have a rep from a volunteer actually from the High CAPP office that comes out to provide information on insurance counseling. So even if you have a medical bill that you're having troubles with it and you just can't follow the tracking of following through and calling to try to resolve the bill. If you feel that it's incorrect, the high cap counselor can help you with that. And also through the county is legal assistance for seniors. So they do have limited services that they can provide, but yet they do come out to the center and then the transportation services through Measure B and Measure B funds. We have the East Bay Paratransit services. We help with applications. We have the Mr. Tip program, which provides rides help ride home from the medical appointments, the premium taxi program, and then the shuttle that circulates that community on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, which is open to all residents. However, we try to provide seating to seniors or the disabled individuals first, but in addition, we offer consumer presentations. So that's an opportunity to come out to learn about some of these topics in more detail. And not only do we provide educational opportunities, we also do fun things like we do. We do laughter, yoga. We're going to do something in October where we focus on beauty. So there's we try to serve our interest. We have a nice gentleman in our community, a retired dentist who comes out and provides dental consultation. He volunteers his time. That way you can get a second opinion for free and a podiatrist within our community that comes out to provide consultation as well. The tax preparation assistance. I'm always most pleased with that. In 2014 we served 630 folks. And with that we provided refunds in the amount of glasses work. And they don't work. I have $323,652 and also taxes do of 85,962. But what's really, I think moving is that people saved $80,850 because the average cost to have your tax prepared and this is an an inexpensive fee is $150. So that money saved and stayed in somebody's pocket. And then in 2014, we were able to collaborate and partner with Alameda Family Services, which is really huge for us because we've always experienced. Individuals that need case management services and we are not mere recreation, so we're not really skilled or staffed to provide case management services. And we have over the years provided information and referral to some of these other county or city entities. But we cannot follow the case through. And Alameda Family Services has been able to really help those individuals and, you know, specifically seniors. And you don't often hear of shelters that provide shelter for homeless seniors. So it's a unique area and it's something that has really helped staff and really help those that we serve. So that's been. A real bonus for us. In addition to all excuse me, in addition to all these big things, we also focus on food security among our population, which, as you all know, particularly in Alameda County, is a very, very serious issue. We address that through a reasonably priced lunch offered every day to individuals 60 and older. That provides an opportunity both for a nutritional meal, but also the terribly important aspect of socialization as well. An opportunity to be with other people for part of the day and be with other people over a meal is an ideal way of doing it. We have served almost 6700 lunches last year. We have also been in the participated in the process of delivering something in excess of £30,000 of food. We put out bread and all kinds of other food packages and parcels. We even have an organic garden that is growing rapidly and we have put out close to 3200 bags of organic greens and vegetables that people can pick up on their own on a monday. And believe me, they put out 110 bags out and they're gone in 15 minutes. Each bag contains one serving of a salad or green. So we do a lot on small items as well as the big items. So the members of Mastic are phone microphones. Thank you. They then ask the members of Mastic are the role models for healthy active living. 23,064 attended fitness classes now that there is some duplication there. But that does show you that folks value our program and they value it enough that they continue to participate in the program. So whether it's fitness three days a week, yoga twice a week, Pilates dance, you name it, we offer every type of dance class. 24,842 participate in intellectual classes. So we're fortunate enough to offer computer classes, foreign language, and that we offer English as a second language. American Sign Language German Conversation Group. French Conversation. Spanish and Italian. Current events. Ceramics. Stained glass. We're really fortunate. And then 17,242 participated in social interaction. So that could be coming into play bridge, sitting together and putting a puzzle together and special events that we offer at the center. Okay. Yes, it is. So funding. So as mentioned prior the recreation department matchsticks a division of and they provide 85% of the funding for the center. However, the Mastic Senior Center Advisory Board, through their fundraising avenues provide 15% of the budget. And so this past year, we generated $169,710 through fundraising and donations. $23,134 went into capital projects at that included getting wi fi up and running. Finally, it was quite a feat at Mastec because the building is built like a fort. Our walls are very solid and so to get the signals to transmit and we removed the dry rot at belly banned decorative molding from the exterior of the social hall and replaced the overhang over the social hall. We went around and painted all the railings. We worked with a professional landscape. Firm to come up with. A drought tolerant landscape plan moving forward. And we've also explored purchasing stationery, fitness equipment to go in outdoors. We also are working on adding a bocce ball court and a putting green for our members to use. And we've been working with color consultants because the surplus that was 78,683 will be rolled into painting the exterior as well as repairing the dry rod. For the building. The center is managed essentially by the senior center advisory board. It's a 15 member board. We have ten active committees. So there's a lot of volunteer time put in the management of the facility and the management of the programing under Jackie's supervision. The board also manages and operates and sets strategy and goals for two primary fundraising programs, our bingo program, which generates about 40 $800 a month for Saturdays a month, we provide bingo to 100 plus people and our thrift shop, which is open two days a week and provides approximately 70 $200 a month in profit. And again, all of these are run by volunteers. We've done a direct letter campaign and we're talking about other strategies going forward to look at raising additional dollars. And the key reason for these additional dollars is to maintain what we like to think of as our asset. But indeed, it's your asset that we're maintaining with you. And we have done that to the tune of just slightly over $1,000,000 in the last 20 years. And we're putting a good deal more into painting and repairing. So if you come and visit the center, you'll see it's an amazingly well-maintained building given its age and the heavy use it gets. And a lot of that has to do with what the Mastic Senior Center Advisory Board is able to raise and manage as capital investment for you and the community. The volunteers, as I mentioned in my thank you to you for coming to the recognition luncheon a couple of weeks ago are, of course, the heart of the Mastic Senior Center program. They serve as board members. They manage the front desk, they serve lunch, they teach classes. They do tax preparation at no fee. They coordinate and assist with the thrift shop and the bingo, both of which take an enormous number of people to manage effectively and well and safely. We have over 200 volunteers who have put in just under 25000 hours of volunteer time at a savings of just under $500,000 in labor costs. And that's 12 full time staff equivalents. So that's 12 employees essentially on your payroll based on the work and the activity we're trying to do to generate support for the seniors in the community. You want to do this one? I mean, anywhere. Oops. Too fast. We're almost done. One more page, maybe. Well, think again. Oh. Different. So this is the. This was the one time on a recent master's survey we sent out. We've done several surveys, actually. We're beginning to acquire a great deal of information about how people come to the Mastic Senior Center and what they need from the senior center. And we've developed a fairly strong program of surveying, and we looked at the AARP database of 8000 names and we sent out a survey and 90% of the respondents, 90% of the AARP audience. Are familiar with the Mastic Senior Center 90%. That's an astonishing piece of marketing and public relations. 94% of the respondents would recommend Mastic Senior Center to a friend or a family member. Most of that awareness and attention was generated through the activity guide, obviously, but also simply by driving by the Mastic Senior Center. And I guess the last point I want to make is we have, as you heard at the very beginning, just under 3500 members. That's 5% of your population and they all vote. Thank you so much for supporting the work of Mastec, for supporting the seniors and the community, and for your attention and interest to our work. Thank you. I also wanted to add that on Wednesday, May 27th, we are doing a walk for older Americans month, so we'll be walking two and a half miles this year. We thought we would just come down Santa Clara to city hall, visit the rec office and head on back that from 10 to 2. We're partnering with Alameda Elder Communities and we are doing. A. Kind of a fair we'll have all kinds of different classes offered at 30 minute intervals and different community members talking about different services that they offer to the senior senior community. So I invite you all to come out and join us on Wednesday, the 27th. And don't you have a fashion show come in? We have a fashion show coming up next Thursday, and we have several. Models here with. Us now. So we still have tickets available. They're $20. They support the center, but it's next Thursday. Doors open at 11. Thank you. Thank you. Member comments. I just want to say that sounds fantastic. As Carlos Carlos Santana used to say, Mastic is fantastic. Remember, Audie. Just real briefly, thank you for the presentation and thank you for all the work. I mean, Mastic is really one of the finest community assets we have. And I appreciate all the work that the staff has done and all the volunteers. So thanks very much. And I'd like to add that you also have a notary, Mr. Brunetti and that's another important service to many of us that you can get there. We have a motion to receive the report. A move that con. All those in favor by unanimously passes. Thank you. Six P.