Dedicated volunteers spend their days helping seniors
SUISUN CITY — Good deeds are what brought volunteers Lyle Winters and Dorothy Davis to the Suisun City Senior Center years ago. Now they spend their days — and some evenings — working to ensure that programs there continue for local seniors.
Winters, 84, was born in Iowa and has lived in Suisun City for more than 37 years. He first came to the center when he brought his father to participate in activities during the early 1990s.
“I wanted to get him out of the house and around people,” Winters said, “After that, I just kept coming back.”
Winters arrives at 7:30 a.m. every weekday to play pinochle with friends in a rotating game that enables him time to stop and help with other activities and programs. He helps serve the noon meal at the center, has lunch and leaves to run errands, then heads home in the early afternoon.
Winters is passionate about the lunch program, sponsored by Meals On Wheels.
“Some of the elderly wouldn’t eat if they didn’t come here for lunch,” Winters said. “They wouldn’t get any nutrition at all. We look out for them and make sure they eat.”
In June 2011, Winters was honored with the Senior Coalition of Solano County’s Living Legacy award for 20 years of dedicated service to area seniors. The senior center director, Karen Mickens, nominated Winters because of his ongoing commitment and support.
“I trust him completely, and consider him a friend,” Mickens said. Winters also shares his love of travel by organizing monthly trips for the center’s participants, plus one or two extended trips every year. He plans the itineraries for the journeys.
“We’ve been to Ireland, Spain, Morocco. . . ,” Winters said. “I tell the people, ‘save your money’, so they can go on the big trips.”
He works with a travel agency to find discounted excursions for the group and is planning cruises to Hawaii and the Panama Canal this year.
A Chicago native, Davis, 73, moved to Richmond before settling in Suisun City. She was waiting for a bus three years ago when another woman left her purse on the bench.
“I looked and saw the (senior center) building and brought the purse in,” Davis said. There, she met Barbara Edwards, an active senior volunteer and previous board president of the Suisun Senior Partners organization, a nonprofit dedicated to lending support to the center and local senior programs. Edwards, who has since died, encouraged Davis to participate in the many activities offered.
“Barbara kept inviting me to come to the Senior Partners meetings, and wanted me to be on the board,” Davis said.
Davis and Winters now both serve on the board, she as president and he as treasurer. The full board, and other senior members of the organization, meets monthly to plan fundraising events to raise money to help furnish necessities for the senior center. In addition to her duties as president, Davis serves every morning as the center’s receptionist and spends afternoons running the bingo program, a popular program and important fundraiser. She walks to and from the center from her home.
Winters and Davis share compassion and love for the seniors with whom they work.
When asked what they like most about volunteering, they enthusiastically answered that they like to help.
“We just want to help the elderly and make sure they have some place to come,” Winters said.
Reach Ana Wangeline at 427-6981 or awangeline@dailyrepublic.net.
Short URL: http://www.dailyrepublic.com/?p=122614
Posted by Ana S. Wangeline
on Feb 9 2012.
Filed under Seniors, The Other Side of 50. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
