Denise Niese, executive director of the Wood County Committee on Aging, serves French toast with volunteer Jim Rebar Wednesday evening.
J.D. Pooley | Sentinel-Tribune
If you see the executive director of the Wood County Committee on Aging flipping French toast in the senior center kitchen, your eyes are not mistaken.
The 42 committee on aging staff members, both full and part time, are cross trained so they can fill in anywhere to help all eight senior centers stay open.
Due to a vacation, Executive Director Denise Niese is responsible for dinner this week at the main senior center on South Grove Street.
“It’s summer and you can’t deny people vacation,” she said. “They need their vacation because they’re covering for everyone else.”
The committee on aging, which also operates senior centers in Perrysburg, Walbridge, Pemberville, North Baltimore, Rossford, Wayne and Grand Rapids, is down about a half-dozen employees, Niese said.
That doesn’t stop them from providing lunches at the centers and delivering meals to seniors at their homes across the county five days a week. Dinner is served at the Bowling Green senior center three days a week.
“We juggle well,” Niese said.
On Wednesday, she cooked French toast, hashbrowns and sausage links. She said there have been an average of 50 seniors — sometimes as high as 80 — who come for dinner.
To prepare, Niese cracked open the cookbook “Food for Fifty,” then doubled the recipe.
On Thursday, she was serving teriyaki chicken and rice.
Niese said that many other committees on aging across the state have reduced meal services and activities — or haven’t come back from the coronavirus pandemic at all.
She said she and the staff are determined to keep the centers open for Wood County seniors. Volunteers are also key to helping and offering programming, she said.
“We’ve come off of two years with not having seniors in the building and we don’t want to go back to isolation,” Niese said. “Our philosophy has always been at the end of the day, every senior is served.
“We may not be doing what our regular job is, but we’re doing what needs to be done,” she said. “We’ve made a commitment. If we have a resurgence of COVID and we have to close down because of health issues, then this board will have to make a decision.
“But if it’s a case that somebody has to work a little differently than normal, that’s what we’ll do.”
