We get around

Dwight Lewis feels as though he is paying back the grace and good fortune he has received.

Young retirees enabling the elderly to stay at home

It’s early, possibly 6:30 a.m. when Dwight Lewis pulls up in front of a residential building, parks the car and heads over to get buzzed in. Inside, he helps an elderly man into his coat, then helps put a bag and cane into the trunk. They could be heading to Kingston for a doctor’s appointment. If it’s likely to be an unnerving experience, Dwight accompanies his passenger into the clinic, cracking jokes to ease the stress.

One man says, “Dwight is an angel.”

Dwight is a man with warm eyes and a cheerful, unpretentious disposition. He’s not a taxi driver. In fact, he’s a retired accountant, a volunteer driver for Prince Edward Community Care for Seniors. He gets paid 40 cents per kilometre to cover the cost of gas and the wear to his car. But he offers these rides because he wants to help.

“The appreciation that the seniors show you—sometimes they’re almost overwhelmed with someone going out of their way to help them out. And I would imagine that most of those people have helped tons of others throughout their lifetime,” says Dwight. “People have always been trying to help me or giving me help since I was a young person. So now that I’m retired, I try to give something back, as best I can.”

Catherine Rand relies on the kindness of volunteers like Dwight Lewis to remain in her County home.

Dwight has been a volunteer driver since April. Before that, he had been volunteering doing income tax for Community Care clients for four years. He is one of a group of about 30 volunteer drivers, mostly younger retirees. They have been helping older seniors living at home who can’t drive or have limitations get to doctor’s appointments. Some will drive to Kingston. Some further afield.

“We were in our 80s and moving into town. Because I thought, [my husband] wasn’t as well and I wasn’t quite as well, and so we just decided that we need somebody to take us for medical appointments,” says 93-year-old Katherine. Her husband has since died, but she still makes use of the volunteer driver program for herself.

The drivers get more out of the trips than the ability to help someone in need.

“I’m fairly new to the County, I’ve only been here about five years,” says Dwight. “Some of the folks that we drive are quite old, and they’ve lived their whole lives here. And they tell you stories about why there’s that hill there or who used to live there. It’s quite amazing how much you can learn about the County back when it was I guess more isolated or something, it wasn’t the tourist attraction it is now.”

Set up in 1982, the volunteer driver program is part of a larger project by Prince Edward Community Care for Seniors, an organization funded by the ministry of Health and Long Term Care. Community Care’s goal is to keep the County’s eldest residents at home and independent longer.

Drivers are required to submit vulnerable sector police checks, a driver’s abstract and references. They are also vetted through an interview process.

“One of the things people often have a concern about with the volunteer driver program is, gee, you know, you don’t know who your mom is in the car with going to Kingston,” says Debbie MacDonald Moynes, executive director for the County’s Community Care for Seniors. “We take this very seriously; we work it through very carefully.”

The program is not meant to replace taxi services. In fact, most users also use taxis for trips around town, to get groceries or go to and from community events. MacDonald Moynes participates in the County Community Foundation’s Vital Signs working group, focusing on bringing better transportation options to the County, and volunteer drivers, along with taxis and buses, are an important part of that process.

“We’ll be involved in whatever happens. Because you can’t work in this field and try to support people to live in their home in a rural community like this and not be involved in transportation,” says MacDonald Moynes. “It pervades everything.”

Prince Edward Community Care for Seniors, like many organizations helping seniors in the County, is always looking for volunteers. Because many seniors are eventually obliged by lack of mobility to move closer to services, the organization is especially concentrating in the north and at the far points of the County to further their mission of enabling seniors to stay at home longer.