ALERT: Scarsdale’s Meals on Wheels to close next month
Lack of funds and leadership cited
Food for thought Meals on Wheels would need supervisors and a cash infusion to survive.
BY DEBORAH SKOLNIK
As we head towards the season of holiday bounty, the Insider has learned that Scarsdale’s decades-old Meals on Wheels service will cease operations in November. “That’s the conclusion we’ve come to after a couple of years of being unable to find financing and people who are willing to take on supervisory roles,” said Steven Frankel, the organization’s self-appointed treasurer.
“In the days when the Scarsdale Inquirer existed, they would put an article in about us and we would get donations and so forth, but a lot of that has dried up now,” Frankel said. (The Insider would have helped had it known.) In addition, while there is no lack of volunteers to transport meals to clients, Frankel and the group’s President, Cathy Harary, were unable to recruit someone to oversee complex tasks including bookkeeping. “We are a not-for-profit corporation, and so there are statutory requirements,” Frankel explained. “There are issues with licenses and permits, and dealings with the entities that prepare the meals that are delivered to our office.”
A dwindling board of directors
About 20 to 25 yeas ago, Frankel’s wife became involved with Scarsdale’s Meals on Wheels as a volunteer. “Eventually, she and another woman and several of the volunteers really constituted the board,” Frankel shared. Yet sadly, Frankel’s spouse passed away, and the board steadily lost more members. “People get old, people die, people move,” Frankel said. He himself has relocated to Yonkers.
Five years ago, he stepped into the treasurer role and Harary became the organization’s leader. “No one voted us in and nobody voted us out,” Frankel said. “We’re the only ones left.” Together with an administrative assistant, Robin Goldstein, they run the operation out of the basement of the Scarsdale Congregational Church. But increasingly, Frankel finds his duties difficult to shoulder. “I spend five to six months a year in Florida, so I am doing a lot of things remotely, and I am eighty-five years old,” he explained. Harary, who lives in Edgemont, plans to move to New York City.
Searching in vain for funding
For years, The Village of Scarsdale provided the organization with a stipend to cover Goldstein’s salary and administrative expenses. It began as $10,000 a year, and over time rose to $12,000 annually to keep pace with the cost of living. “And now Robin does considerably more than her job description,” Frankel shared. The catch, he said, “is that we are not sure we have a continuing supply of money from the Village. There has always been an application, and for the first eight or nine years it was really automatic—we’d get the application, and it was the same as the prior year’s, and we’d fill it out. Every year, we would get the quarterly payments like clockwork, but in the last year and a half we had to keep calling to ask why we hadn’t gotten our payment yet. This year, we were paid through the end of May, and then our contract expired. [We were told] it would have to go through the Village Board, but then we never got a new application,” he recalled.
Frankel and Harary then made the rounds to various community organizations and religious institutions, looking for help. “We can’t seem to get replies,” he said. “We are at a point where we potentially need some funding because insurance costs have gone up, and our supplier of meals has not raised his price for two or three years now, and we expect that to come.” As for circling back to the Village and once again asking for the stipend, Frankel says he has lost his appetite for the quest.
A gnawing concern "I worry for them," Frankel said of Scarsdale Meals on Wheels's clients.
A loss for the local clientele
Although Goldstein has generously signaled she might be able to continue her duties as a volunteer, it still won’t be enough to keep Scarsdale’s Meals on Wheels going, since the lack of financial expertise remains. Within just a few weeks, the program will wind down.
It doesn’t mean that the people who use the service will lose access to free food, however. “The difference between Scarsdale Meals on Wheels and others is that we charge our clients for the meals. They are not free,” Frankel said. They cost only $6 apiece, though. “And most of our clients, if not all, would not qualify [for free meals] because they either live in their own home or they have help. These people are not going to starve to death, [although] some of them have financial difficulties, and for others it will be extremely difficult to go out and get food,” Frankel shared. Currently, the program has 12 clients in the 10583 zip code, which encompasses not only Scarsdale but parts of Yonkers, Eastchester, and New Rochelle.
It is these people, who depend on Scarsdale’s Meals on Wheels, who will suffer most from the program’s closure. “We sent letters out informing them that October is the last month they will get meals,” Frankel said. Some clients have asked for a couple of extra frozen meals. “I’m worried about those people,” Frankel continued.
He intends to remain involved a little while longer. “The process in New York [State] to liquidate and dissolve a non-profit corporation can be complex. I am going work while I’m in Florida to take of that as soon as possible,” he shared. Is there any hope for Meals on Wheels to survive? There’s just one way it would be feasible, Frankel said—”If we find people very quickly to replace Cathy and me.”
If you are interested in helping to save Scarsdale’s Meals on Wheels, you can contact Frankel at ryerson1939@gmail.com.