John Stewart is the executive director of Baltimore City’s Commission on Aging and Retirement Education, which advocates for seniors and provides programs, services and activities for older adults. Stewart joined Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin at the Waxter Center for Senior Citizens in Baltimore to announce an increase in federal aid for the Maryland Energy Assistance Program. The program helps low-income families, including seniors, pay their heating bills.
Its seems like it could be difficult to reach some seniors with information about programs such as this. How do you do it?
Access to information is difficult for many adults, so what we have is 42 eating-together locations, where we provide meals and information. We’ve also sent out information with 600 Meals on Wheels providers.
We think the best opportunity is to get in front of them at centers … where we can take their application and help them directly. There’s a lot of seniors who just don’t know about these programs.
How important are issues of heating and energy assistance at this time of year?
I think you have a perfect storm brewing in the city about energy. With the economy, weather, and people turning to alternative methods of heating their home, that’s going to be a huge issue.
How else can you get the message out to seniors?
This is our job; these are the people we want to help; we know many of them; we’re on the ground running with these people. And we tell the to be ambassadors for us, to tell their friends and neighbors about our programs.
