Across the U.S. more than 5 million seniors are food insecure.

By Steve Moran & Todd Schmiedeler, Trilogy Health Services

You no doubt learned about the Irish Potato Famine in high school. But to refresh your memory during a 5-year period around 1 million people died and another million left Ireland radically reshaping Europe and spreading untold misery to families.   

Now . . . imagine the entire country of Ireland is hungry. Potato famine hungry. In the United States today that is the magnitude of hunger in seniors.

Across the U.S., more than 5 million seniors are food insecure. In other words, they do not know where their next meal or the meal after that will come from. Many of these seniors are too embarrassed to ask for help. Others either don’t have access to technology or the technological skills to sign-up for the SNAP food program (more commonly known as “Food Stamps”).

Instead, they need help from local people who care. Isn’t that what our industry does? Well, then let’s do something about it.

Action Plan

Trilogy Health Services has started. Already there are senior living organizations that dole out thousands of meals a day to seniors, including Trilogy. They’ve started to do this: our employees pooled together and raised 1.5 million pounds of food for local food banks to serve hungry seniors. This helps the 1 in 5 seniors that are food insecure (read: hungry).

This is what we are thinking:

If you would like for your community to be a food drive participant, sign up!

Todd will send out details including lessons learned in their drive. We will work together as an industry to make a dent in the number of hungry seniors and to get the story told in the local and national media.

Our dream is to get at least 10 national organizations to join this effort.

Let’s feed our local seniors and show them that we care!

Are you in?

Todd Schmiedeler serves as Trilogy Health Service’s Senior Vice President of Foundation & Workforce Development. Todd provides leadership for the Trilogy Foundation, Live a Dream Foundation, Employee Wellbeing, Community Outreach, and Workforce Development. Since April 2011, the Trilogy Foundation has increased its fundraising from $74,000 to $2,100,000, and over the past year raised more than 1,500,000 lbs. of food and $800,000 for local senior-based nonprofits across Trilogy’s 100+ campuses. Email: [email protected]