Ryan Desch, a volunteer with the Senior Resource Center of Douglas County's Senior Meals program, prepares meals for delivery Friday in his northeast Lawrence route. Both Senior Meals and Lawrence Meals on Wheels are dependent of volunteers to deliver meals.

As he negotiated the shower-dampened streets Friday on his Senior Meals route, volunteer driver Ryan Desch gave a running commentary on the seniors on his delivery list.

One was a 103-year-old woman living with her daughter who vaguely recalled what was called the Great War before it was renamed with the coming of a second global conflict. Another senior was to a 92-year-old widow whose husband was wounded twice in World War II and who remembers trying to read between the lines of letters he sent from Italy to figure out where he was. Down a few streets on the route between Lawrence Memorial Hospital and the Lawrence Country Club is a veteran of that war, who Desch said derives great joy from mowing his large lawn on a John Deere garden tractor.

At his next stop, Desch stoops to pick up the latest copy of the Journal-World from the driveway before delivering meals to Frank and Edna Day.

“We call him Zippy, because he zips in and zips out,” Frank Day said.

The couple said they were thankful for the “sustaining” meals Desch delivers, which helps them stretch their retirement income. There are also thankful for the equally sustaining moments of conversation, as they catch Desch up on a planned trip to Washington, D.C., later this spring.

There’s irony in such moments, Desch said, noting he took on the three-day-a-week volunteer route three years ago as way to get out of his “comfort zone.”

“I saw this as a challenge,” he said. “When I was growing up, my parents would go to a nursing home. I found that and old people scary. That seems so weird to me now with the friends I’ve made.”

Those relationships are a perk of the route he runs during a break from his duties as an agent with Stephens Real Estate, Desch said. The social contacts and welfare checks he provides benefit those on the route, but Desch said one senior brought home the reality of the central importance of the Senior Meals program.

“She’s told me if it weren’t for this, there would be days she wouldn’t eat,” he said.

That’s the truth with many served through the three senior meals programs that get the state and federal funding the Jayhawk Area Agency on Aging administers, said Jayhawk AAA executive director Jocelyn Lyons. It’s a fact of life that causes her to wonder in what world White House budget director Mick Mulvaney was living when he recently stated that Meals on Wheels “sounds great,” but that President Donald Trump’s first budget wouldn’t continue to fund a program that “doesn’t work.”

“We have an older population who faces food insecurity,” she said. “When you have no empathy for the people you represent, it does cause some concern.”

In addition to her own agency’s CHAMPSS program — Choosing Healthy Appetizing Meal Plan Solution for Seniors, through which seniors can purchase low-cost meals at both Lawrence Hy-Vee stores and three Dillons stores — the Jayhawk AAA also distributes state and federal funding to the Senior Meals program of the Senior Resource Center for Douglas County and Lawrence Meals on Wheels, Lyons said. Some of the federal funds are available through Community Development Block Grants, but the Older Americans Act provides more federal money, she said.

She hasn’t yet put a pencil to just what the effect of the cuts to the CDBG funding would be in the Trump Administration’s 2018 proposed budget, in part because it would probably be changed before gaining congressional approval, Lyons said.

The directors of the two Douglas County home-delivered senior meals programs say although threats from Washington to end some of their funding are concerning, they are well positioned to withstand cuts.

“Anytime there is talk about government budget cuts or less grant money, it is a concern,” said Kim Cullis, director of Lawrence Meals on Wheels. “The cuts are impacting the Community Development Block Grants. We don’t rely heavily on those. We are blessed to have a board that believes we have to have multiple avenues of funding.”

Cullis said federal and state funding provided less than 20 percent of funding for Lawrence Meals on Wheels. The greatest funding source for its annual budget was from private donations and fundraising, such as the current March of Meals Match pledge-card campaign, she said. Client contributions also make possible the 266 home-delivered meals the program serves Monday through Friday and those delivered to Midland Care in North Lawrence, she said.

Senior Meals’ funding sources are also diversified, said Heidi Briery, director of the program. State and federal sources provide about one-third of the program’s annual budget of about $100,000, she said. Donations and client payments provide the bulk of the program’s operating revenue that allows Senior Meals to deliver meals to 170 Lawrence, Baldwin City, Lecompton, Eudora and rural residents, she said.

Seniors Meals and Meals on Wheels both deliver noon meals Monday through Friday in Lawrence. The difference between the two programs is that Meals on Wheels delivers exclusively to Lawrence and provides Lawrence Memorial Hospital-prepared meals for those on dietary restrictions. They are available only to the homebound or those who have a spouse who is.

Senior Meals does not have the strict homebound qualification and delivers in Lawrence, Baldwin City, Eudora, Lecompton and rural areas of Douglas County. Although the Senior Meals prepared at Southern Accents Catering are planned by a dietitian, they are not prepared to meet specific medical diets, Briery said.

The programs are similar in that they charge less than the meals cost to prepare. Although both programs have a suggested donation price, neither will tie meal delivery to a client’s ability to pay.

The other thing the two programs have in common is their dependence on volunteer delivery drivers.

“We are very much dependent on volunteers, and we always need more,” Briery said. “I need a minimum of 10 drivers a day. If 20 people come in one day a week to deliver meals, it makes a big difference.”

Her current pressing need is for more volunteers for Baldwin City and rural routes, Briery said. She also plans to expand deliveries in rural areas of the county.

“I know there are people out there who need a good meal once a day, and they don’t have a support system to help them with that,” she said.

Keeping seniors in the home is central to the home-delivered meals programs’ missions, and a big part of that is the discrete safety checks volunteer drivers make on the condition of seniors on their routes.

“My drivers are fabulous at that,” Cullis said. “They know right away if something is wrong. If yesterday’s meal is still in the fridge, that’s a big concern. If we notice a change in condition, we’ll notify the right people. As long as we can help keep them safely in their own homes, that’s the alternative everybody should want.”